Claire Dowie is an award-winning writer and performer with a reputation for work that defies categorisation. Originally trained as a dancer, she started writing poetry (published by Faber and Apples and Snakes) and quickly gained a reputation as an outspoken and hilarious stand up comic on the cabaret circuit in the early eighties. She felt limited by the need for punchlines and started writing plays, inventing her own genre: stand up theatre.

Claire Dowie combines the smoothness and audience rapport of a stand-up comic, the hypnotic intensity of an inspired storyteller and the inventiveness of an insightful and sensitive author, alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) comic, moving and frightening, sprinkled with flashes of high comedy.