Company, BBC Television, the Arvon Foundation, Liverpool Playhouse, Nottingham Playhouse and Riverside Studios. He has lectured at Dartington College of Arts, Birmingham University (on the MA in Playwriting Studies programme), Nottingham Trent University, Charles University in Prague and at the Performance Art Academy in Sofia. Lowe has been a member of various theatre boards and advisory panels, including Great Eastern Stage Company. He was on the council of Arts Council England, and was Chair of Arts Council England - East Midlands from 2004 to 2010. Lowe's play Touched was joint winner of the George Devine Award in 1977, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Nottingham in July 2011. In July 2015, Nottingham Express Transit named one of their new trams "Stephen Lowe" in his honour. Early life Lowe was born Stephen James Wright in Sneinton, Nottingham, where his father was a labourer and his mother was a machinist in Nottingham's Lace Market. He graduated from Birmingham University in English and Theatre Studies. After university, Lowe worked in various jobs while writing, including part-time lecturer, clerk, hospital receptionist, newspaper distributor, advertising manager, housepainter, barman and civil servant. While working as a part-time shepherd in the Yorkshire Dales, he was commissioned by Alan Ayckbourn to write a comedy double-bill, Comic Pictures, and joined his Scarborough Theatre in the Round company as an actor and writer. Ayckbourn produced Comic Pictures in 1976. Lowe took his mother's maiden name as a professional identity in 1976, when he joined Ayckbourn's company. Peace plays In the 1980s, Lowe edited two anthologies of peace plays for Methuen. The first volume was of plays by British playwrights, including Deborah Levy, Adrian Mitchell, and Lowe himself (Keeping Body and Soul Together). It was published in 1985 during a period of increased tension towards the end of the Cold War, and Lowe's introduction quoted from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Nobel acceptance speech, "we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of a utopia of a very different kind." The second volume, published in 1990, came out of the new era of glasnost and a thaw in relations between the two superpowers. For this volume Lowe selected plays by two American playwrights, Arthur Kopit and Richard Stayton; and by two Russian playwrights, Fyodor Burlatsky, a former adviser to Khrushchev and