Notes to Future Self

Judy's my mom. It's an understatement to say she's a bit of a hippy. I mean who else but a New Ager calls their baby 'Philosophy Rainbow'? I try to go by 'Sophie'. Sophie and Calliope have never been to school. Their mum ran away from home when she was seventeen to join the New Age movement and the girls were raised in a series of ashrams, communes and impromptu raves. When Sophie gets ill, they return to Birmingham - a strange new world where meditation and tree-hugging are replaced with maths homework and TV and the grandmother they have never met. And it's against this bewildering new backdrop - the normality she's always longed for - that Sophie must come to terms with her mortality. Lucy Caldwell's Notes to Future Self opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in February 2011.

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for 'All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various - New Irish Short Stories.