Playwright and director Nina Raine left Oxford High School in 1994 for Christ Church, Oxford, where she graduated in 1998 with a First in English Literature. She is the daughter of the poet Craig Raine and Ann Pasternak Slater, who was also educated at OHS, and the grand-niece of the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak.
In 2000, Nina won the Channel Four/Jerwood Space Young Regional Theatre Director bursary to train as a director at the Royal Court Theatre. She has since directed many plays including Shades by Alia Bano as part of the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers’ Festival in 2009, Jumpy by April De Angelis at the Royal Court and in the West End, and Longing, an adaptation of two Chekov short stories by William Boyd in 2011. In 2006, she won the TMA Best Director Award.
Nina’s first play, Rabbit, which she also directed, premiered in London in 2006. Rabbit won both the 2006 Evening Standard’s Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright and the Most Promising Playwright Award at the 2006 Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards when it transferred New York.
Her second play, Tribes, was produced by the Royal Court in London, in October 2010 and had its Australian and US premieres in 2012. This was followed in 2011 by Tiger Country, then Consent in 2017, which opened at the National starring Anna Maxwell Martin and Ben Chaplin and most recently Stories, which opened at the National in 2018 and was described in The Times as ‘hugely entertaining, bruising and tender.’
Nina returned to OHS in 2018, where she joined the Year 13 group then studying her own 2010 play Tribes, a darkly comedic entertainment about a dysfunctional British Jewish family and the ways in which the bonds of family and affinity are formed and broken. It was an unforgettable experience for the girls and a rare chance to have an author confirm beyond dispute the students’ various! Nina was wonderfully matter of fact and provided the girls with great advice about how to make it as a female creative in the arts – we hope she comes back soon.