At 4:00 a.m. on a secluded farm, a woman fights to take her life back from a serial killer as her desperate sister and a haunted police officer reach across time and distance in an attempt to rescue her.

Colleen Murphy is a playwright, filmmaker and librettist, born in 1954 in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, raised in Northern Ontario, and now based in Toronto. Her play Pig Girl won the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama as well as the 2014 Carol Bolt Award. The December Man / L'homme de decembre won the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama, the CAA/Carol Bolt Award and the Enbridge Playwrights Award. Other plays include The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, The Breathing Hole (shortlisted for the Susan Blackburn Prize, U.S. and the Carol Bolt Award), Bright Burning, Armstrong's War, The Goodnight Bird, Beating Heart Cadaver (shortlisted for the 1999 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama) The Piper and Down in Adoration Falling. Libretti include Oksana G., (c. Aaron Gervais) for Tapestry Opera (nominated for seven Dora Mavor Moore Awards), Bring Me The Head Of The President and My Mouth On Your Heart, (c. August Murphy-King) for Tapestry and Toy Piano Composers and Bicycle Opera, respectively. Colleen twice won prizes in the CBC Literary Competition. She is also an award-winning filmmaker and her distinct films have played in festivals around the world.

Colleen has been Writer-in-Residence at four theatres and six Canadian universities and Canadian Playwright-in-Residence at Finborough Theatre in London UK. In 2017, Colleen was awarded a Canada Council New Chapter Grant to write a six-hour play, Geography of Fire / La Furie et sa geographie.

Upcoming: libretto for Fantasma (c. Ian Cusson) for the Canadian Opera Company, Fall 2021; screenplay for Armstrong's War, produced by Solo Productions (Mary-Young Leckie), Fall 2021.

Colleen Murphy's profile page

• Winner, Carol Bolt Award

“Murphy’s work is refreshingly unpredictable...She is a keen observer, a shrewd and independent-minded analyst. And a terrific writer, with un-showy, economical dialogue, and tightly structured action. . .Building tension, never sensationalizing, or exploiting the suffering of the victim she shows—a bright student sunk into drug-addiction and lured to the farm by promises of new pharmaceuticals—Murphy gives depth to each character.” —Timothy Ramsden, ReviewsGate, London UK

“Pig Girl succeeds not only in giving voice to the dead but by vocalising an important social injustice of its own: a missing prostitute is distinctly different from a missing person.” —Alecia Marshall, British Theatre Guide

“ . . . a deeply feminist, profoundly political work.”—Alex Ramon, Public Reviews, London UK

“It’s a powerful and provocative story, told with beauty and utter fearlessness.” —Paula Simmons, The Edmonton Journal