Top five Asian playwrights

Our thriving Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities are finally getting the cultural representation they deserve. Here are five of the best...

1. Hanif Kureishi

Probably our best-known Asian-British writer, the controversial pontificator on boys' eternal problems with an ethnic minority twist became equally contentious with Sleep With Me, in which the newly separated author transferred his thoughts on abandoning his family to the stage.

2. Meera Syal

The Wolverhampton-born writer recently added playwrighting to her lengthy CV - which includes credits for screenwriting, novels and creating and starring in TV show Goodness Gracious Me - when she wrote the story for the Lloyd-Webber super-musical Bombay Dreams.

3. Ayub Khan Din

The actor-turned-playwright's first play, East Is East, a comedy about growing up Asian in 1960s Salford, enjoyed a successful run at the

Royal Court before becoming a hit film.

4. Girish Kamad

An Indian playwright who holds venerable myths up for reinterpretation, Kamad's most recently staged play, Bali - The Sacrifice, reimagined a tenth-century Jain epic as a parable on sexual jealousy.

5. Parv Bancil

Bancil's productive collaboration with leading Asian theatre company Tara Arts means his anarchic plays - which deal with the complexities of Anglo-Indian life from a tragicomic, semi-absurdist standpoint - have graced fringe theatre for more than a decade.