Biography of Susan Battye

Playwright Susan Battye is the Programme Manager for the Bachelor of Maori Performing Arts on the campus in Mangere, Auckland, of Te Wananga O Aotearoa, and former head of Drama at Epsom Girls´ Grammar School. She studied in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1978 for a Diploma in Drama and Education with Dorothy Heathcote. Most of her plays have been written for use in schools and Susan's publishing history is a credit to both their calibre and her knowledge of what teachers want. In 2001 she co-wrote Ponsonby Road with Tim Bray for an adult audience. Susan began writing plays for students she taught at Greymouth High School because she could find nothing to direct that came close to fitting their needs, and nothing in the curriculum that reflected the local community's social history. Together with Thelma Eakin in 1977 she wrote and directed The Shadow of the Valley, a play about New Zealand's biggest industrial accident, the Brunner Mine disaster of 1896. The play was subsequently published by Oxford University Press and has since received many performances throughout New Zealand. Susan is a writer who is in this way inspired to write with particular people and communities in mind. Her most recent work, for example, In the Closet is set in India and New Zealand and it has dialogue in English, Hindi and Maori, reflecting the ethnic mix of the class it was originally written for. "Once students feel the power of theatre to transform their view of the world, to create metaphors for their lives, they never look back," says Battye.