Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Suzie Miller is a contemporary international playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Based in both London and Sydney, Australia, Miller has had her work produced around the world, winning multiple prestigious awards, including for her smash-hit one-woman play Prima Facie, which ran a sold-out, critically successful season on London's West End, winning the Laurence Olivier Awards for Best New Play 2023 and Best Actress 2023; followed by a critically successful season on Broadway, receiving four Tony Award nominations and a win for Best Actress 2023. Miller is educated in science and law, with a doctorate in drama and mathematics. She practiced human rights law before turning to writing full-time and is currently developing major theater, film, and television projects across the UK, USA, and Australia, including feature film adaptations of her plays. Prima Facie is her first novel.
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Q: Why did you decide to adapt your play into a novel, and what do you see as the key differences between the two?
A: Strangely the story for Prima Facie came to me as a story and with a character, Tessa. I wanted to explore the intersectionality of class and gender, and also how the law itself is gendered.
I was particularly interested in how the criminal justice system dealt with sexual assault and rape trials, how the complainant was so undermined in giving evidence and how the "liar" trope is used to advantage.
I also wanted to show where injustice lay in the adversarial legal system when it came specifically to the evidence of women, their testimony and their lived experience of sexual assault.
I first wrote the story in long long form, thinking as I wrote it that it had real novelistic aspects. Then being a professional playwright, I wrote it as a play.
The key differences between the two are:
The length of the novel allows me to write more into Tessa's backstory, what it was like to navigate the community she came from, the lack of real encouragement to have the sort of career she aspired to, an ...
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