Owen McCafferty
Northern Irish playwright
Owen McCafferty (born 1961) is a playwright from Northern Ireland.
Early life
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, McCafferty was brought up in London from the age of 1 until age 10, when his parents returned to Belfast. He was educated at St Augustine's Secondary School, the College of Business Studies and then the University of Ulster, where he studied Philosophy and History.
Career
His play Scenes from the Big Picture, originally produced in 2003 at the National Theatre in London, earned him the John Whiting Award, the Evening Standard's Charles Wintour Award for New Playwriting and the Meyer-Whitworth Award. It was the first time any playwright had won all three awards in one year.
McCafferty has also adapted J P Miller's Days of Wine and Roses but only used the basic structure of the original.
McCafferty's writing features the language and complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. Like John Millington Synge, McCafferty's dialogue is highly stylized.
McCafferty is a member of Aosdána.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Owen McCafferty” as northern Irish playwright. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as northern Irish playwright. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7114569. VIAF identifies the subject as 267972026. The Library of Congress control number is n99022582. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961 and 2003.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Owen McCafferty”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Owen McCafferty primary sources, Owen McCafferty archive and Owen research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Owen McCafferty”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Owen McCafferty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.