Annabel Soutar is a Montreal-based playwright and theatre producer. In 2000 she co-founded Porte Parole Productions with Alex Ivanovici.
Annabel studied English and Theatre at Princeton University, where she learned about the documentary approach to theatre. Since 1998, she has written 8 plays — Novembre, 2000 Questions, Import/Export, Sexy béton, Seeds, The Watershed, Fredy and The Assembly — that have been mounted in Montreal, across Canada and around the world. Her acclaimed plays Seeds and The Watershed have both been published by Talon Books. Seeds has toured to over a dozen theatres across the country, including to the National Arts Centre of Canada in 2014, and in 2020 Seeds first tour in the US was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Seeds was named the best English production of the year by Montreal’s Association of French theatre critics and was nominated for Best New Text and Best English Production by the Académie québécoise du théâtre; and Annabel’s play Sexy béton was a finalist for the prestigious Quebec playwriting award Le prix Michel-Tremblay.
In December 2015, Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper named Soutar to its list of Canadian Artists of the Year.
Since 2014, Soutar has also accompanied young playwrights in Montreal as a dramaturg and producer in the development and production of their documentary plays: J’aime Hydro by Christine Beaulieu, Tout inclus by François Grisé, Rose et la machine by Maude Laurendeau, and Projet Polytechnique with Jean-Marc Dalphond and Marie-Joanne Boucher.
Soutar’s recent collaboration with co-writers Alex Ivanovici and Brett Watson, The Assembly, premiered at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto and Espace Go in Montreal in 2018. Since 2018, the Assembly team has produced new episodes in Canada, the US, Germany, Brazil and in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Annabel was named a Doctor of Letters by McGill University in 2022. She lives with her husband Alex and two daughters Ella and Beatrice in Montreal.
