Willful Acts is an expanded and updated collection of Margaret Hollingsworth’s best-known and most popular plays, including The Apple in the Eye, Everloving, Diving, Islands, and War Babies (nominated for a Governor General’s Award); along with her latest play, Commonwealth Games. Hollingsworth’s earlier work showcases recurring women’s issues and themes (Islands was among the first plays to put lesbian characters front and centre on the Canadian stage). In her new play, Commonwealth Games, Hollingsworth wrestles with the question of what it means to be an English immigrant to Canada at a time when post-colonial thinking and political correctness dominate our lives.

Growing up in Sheffield and London, England, Margaret Hollingsworth wrote plays and worked in theatre while still a teenager before she immigrated to Canada in 1968, where she earned a B.A. in Psychology and an M.F.A., while continuing her writing career. A regular contributor to CBC radio, Hollingsworth has won two ACTRA awards for radio drama. Her non-dramatic writing includes the screenplay for a feature film adaptation of Jane Rule’s Memory Board, and a collection of short stories, Smiling Under Water. A collection of her plays, Willful Acts, was published by Talonbooks in the Spring of 1998. She has served as playwright-in-residence at the Stratford Festival, Concordia University and the University of Western Ontario. She currently lives and writes in Toronto.

Margaret Hollingsworth's profile page