John Arden

John Arden (26 October 1930 – 28 March 2012) was an English playwright whose works tended to expose social issues of personal concern. At his death, he was lauded as "one of the most significant British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 60s one of the very few 20th-century dramatists you could mention in the same breath as Shakespeare, Molière and Brecht without the parallels sounding too far-fetched."

Born in Barnsley (which at the time was in the West Riding of Yorkshire), he was educated at Sedbergh School in Cumbria, King's College, Cambridge and the Edinburgh College of Art, where he studied architecture. He first gained critical attention for the radio play The Life of Man in 1956 shortly after finishing his studies.

Arden was initially associated with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London. His 1959 play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, dealing with the realities of war and protesters against it, is considered his best. His work bore the heavy influence of Bertolt Brecht and the Epic Theatre. Other plays include Live Like Pigs, The Workhouse Donkey and Armstrong's Last Goodnight, the last of which was performed at the National Theatre, starring Albert Finney, after the Royal Court had rejected it. His 1978 radio play Pearl was considered in a Guardian survey to be one of the best plays for that medium.

He also wrote several novels, including Silence Among the Weapons, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1982, and Books of Bale, about the Protestant apologist John Bale. He was a member of the Royal Society of Literature.

During his career he came into conflict with the theatre establishment—with his wife and co-writer Margaretta D'Arcy, he picketed the RSC premiere of his Arthurian play The Island of the Mighty; and together they wrote several plays highly critical of British presence in Ireland, where he and D'Arcy lived from 1971, and the Military-Industrial Complex.

He had a long history of being associated with radical left-wing politics in the UK and Ireland. In 1961 he was a founder member of the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, and he also chaired the pacifist weekly Peace News. In Ireland, he was for a while a member of Official Sinn Féin. He was also a supporter of civil liberties and was critical of government anti-terror legislation, as demonstrated in his 2007 radio play The Scam.

He was elected to Aosdána in 2011 before dying in Galway in 2012. He was waked in a wicker casket.