Nick Hern Books

Nick Hern Books is the UK's leading specialist performing arts publisher with over 1,500 plays and theatre books in our catalogue. We also license most of our plays for amateur performance (see our Plays to Perform site).

Our list of plays includes work by many of the UK's preeminent playwrights, as well as some of the most exciting emerging writers. We work with major theatres and theatre companies across the UK and in Ireland to publish new plays alongside their professional premieres, often in the form of a ‘programme/text’ that combines the functions of theatre programme and playtext.

We also publish many classic plays and plays in translation, together with a wide range of authoritative theatre books, many of them written by well-known theatre practitioners.

Our titles are distributed internationally through our publishing associates: Theatre Communications Group in the USA, Currency Press in Australia and Playwrights Canada Press in Canada.