Robert Holman was born in 1952. He was awarded an Arts Council Writers' Bursary in 1974, and since then has spent periods as resident dramatist with the National Theatre and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon- Avon. His plays include The Natural Cause (Cockpit Theatre, 1974); Mud (Royal Court Theatre, 1974); Outside the Whale (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1976); German Skerries (Bush Theatre, 1977, for which he won the George Devine Award); Other Worlds (Royal Court Theatre, 1983); Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984); The Overgrown Path (Royal Court Theatre, 1985); Making Noise Quietly (Bush Theatre, 1986); Across Oka (Royal Shakespeare, 1988); Rafts and Dreams (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 1990); Bad Weather (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998); Holes in the Skin (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2003); and Jonah and Otto (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2008). He has also written a novel, The Amish Landscape (1992). In 2010 he collaborated with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens on A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, which premiered at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

"Robert Holman is the quiet man among modern British dramatists. But his new play...is an outstanding work that sings with truth" (Michael Billington, Guardian)

Rafts and Dreams: "While digging up the roots of a tree in the garden, Neil, Leo and Hetty uncover a vast underground lake which floods away the world. With Leo at the tiller of his sawn-away living room, the trio begin a voyage of the earth's watery surface. It is a surrealist fantasy at its most thought-provoking, a play whose best bits manage to work like a dream" (Paul Taylor, Independent).
Outside the Whale is a fictional account of the writer George Orwell set in the early 30s in which the action moves easily over a period of three years and settings as various as the basement warehouse of the publishers Victor Gollancz, a hen-hut in Essex and the dosshouse in Romford.