Simon Jaggers is a playwright, dramaturg and theatre-maker. His debut play GUN TO YOUR HEAD sold out at VAULT Festival, toured East Anglia with HighTide, and is published by Playdead Press.
An alumnus of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, he has been shortlisted for the Edinburgh Untapped Award, Theatre503 International Playwriting Award and Charlie Hartill Award, as well as longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize. He co-founded the Dakota Collective, a theatre crew developing original work in non-traditional spaces.
His most recent production, all vibes based sad youtube play, was produced by Rose Theatre, Kingston, in December 2025 with members of their Young Company.
In 2026, he was selected for Hampstead Theatre’s INSPIRE Programme, where he developed his new play Manifest Release Machine under the mentorship of award-winning playwright Simon Stephens.
“Simon Jaggers is a visionary from England’s wastelands. A poet finding beauty in the broken.“
Simon Stephens
“Jaggers’ dialogue is sharp, packed with resonant details and ominous hints.”
THE STAGE
I hate writing bios so here are a few of my favourite things; there’s never an order:
Faces, glitches, storms, medieval minatures, running horses, 12Bar Club (RIP), rivers, fog, scars, Fay Godwin, quarries, w1tch3$, Frank Auerbach, Kelly Link, Hawiian pizza, Euripides, roller coasters, road trips, Marina Carr, S4LEM, ‘Paris Texas’, really long bus journeys, the woods, Alice Munro stories, smoking areas, Reverend Jen’s Anti-slam, eggs, matinees, Stax Records, Last Chance U, George Ewart Evans, internet adventures, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Magik, Desperados, John Prine, torches, motorway service stations, Chekhov, Lana Del Rey, scarecrows, Pavement, Senate House bogs, moon-shadows, The Fox & the Hound, drag country, Crossbones graveyard, Denis Johnson stories, actors, genie a box of matches, Roxanne Shante, flaneuring with vdc and long cigarettes, Ian Dury, Billy Roche, Biggie, prayer boxes, Halloween and mustard, 2nd bench@The Hole, wodwos, whistling, Forged in Fire, Townes, sunsets over petrol stations, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Chalino Sanchez, lap steel, cauldorns of tar, the sea, genre painting, A Warning to the Curious, old skool Cubase, Jack Medley AKA Medders AKA SuperCigarFace AKA SecureAsFuck (Loseit4Lyfe), reading plays in the afternoon, doo-wop, sampling, lanterns, kissing, internet lore, on la paddle with Jimmy Blade, Slick Rick the Ruler, lovers rock, ghost trains, Anne Washburn, Nirvana, the sadness of photography, milk, words and chainsaws, cloth fair, palimpsest, Sophocles, coaching inns, Windmill Brixton, the Holly Man, sailor’s knotts, Vic Godard and the Subway Sect, The Toxic Avenger, Swamp Dogg, Annie Baker, twilight, ghost images, Scout Niblett, Ophelia, Blaze Foley, honey and petrol, scenes in films that make you wanna smoke, Joseph Grimaldi, Google Maps adventures, bending blue wiv Ryan, river locks, Nas, pagan shit, the smell of fairs, Lord Finesse, Honeynut Cheerios, humans, watching, waiting, walking slow, writing fast . . .
“Jaggers loves all his characters in the same way that Dickens does. He has the same relish for drama that Turner had for paint.”
