Morna Young

Morna Young is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter from Moray. She was named Scots Writer of the Year at the inaugural Scots Language Awards in 2019. Most recently, she won the Peggy Ramsay/Film 4 Playwriting Bursary (Traverse), and received an SSP@50 Fellowship (Aberdeen Arts Centre).

Lost at Sea, Morna’s debut full-length play in 2019, won two Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS), a Broadway World Award and was a finalist in the Herald’s Culture Awards. She also wrote the CATS-winning Runrig musical The Stamping Ground (Eden Court / Raw Material), that toured Scotland in 2023. Her most recent productions include Sunset Song (Dundee Rep / Lyceum), named Scots Production of the Year 2025, and The Snow Queen (Lyceum).

Other plays include: Babs, Aye, Elvis, The Silver Superheroes, and Netting (all ‘A Play, A Pie and A Pint’), Americana: A Murder Ballad (Pepperdine Scotland at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Smothes Theatre, California), The Buke of the Howlat (Findhorn Bay Arts), Smite (Jermyn Street Theatre), She of the Sea (Paines Plough), B-Roads (Play Pieces) and Never Land (Eden Court). Digital work released in 2020/21 includes A Fairy Tale (Lyceum), A Passing Dance (Pitlochry Festival Theatre), Stella (Mull Theatre), The Twa Chrisses (Scots Language Centre), and Demon Island (Traverse). Morna is currently working with the Lyceum, Traverse, Rapture Theatre, and Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

Morna has also been writing for screen since receiving the BBC Scotland scholarship 2020 including six episodes of River City (BBC Scotland) – the first of which received a Debut Writer nomination at the New Voices Awards, 2023. She has been part of the writers’ room for Black Camel’s Gifted and Blazing Griffin’s The News Team, and she is currently developing a range of TV and film projects.

Morna was recipient of the Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship (2017), a New Playwrights Award (Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland, 2014) and the ‘Tomorrow at Noon’ award for female playwrights  (Jermyn Street Theatre, 2018). Her international work includes The Traverse’s ‘Scotland-in-Japan’ residency, playwright-in-residence for BATS Theatre in New Zealand for three-months and a Rome residency as part of the Muriel Spark 100 awards.

As a working-class woman and native Scots language speaker, Morna is interested in exploring under-represented voices and her plays often explore class structures. She is also a multi-instrumentalist, half of the band Folkify along with Sandy Nelson, and regularly works with music and song.

Outside of theatre and screen, Morna can be found writing for Psychologies, the UK’s no.1 well-being magazine.

Full information at www.mornayoung.com