Tarell McCraney, University of Warwick Honorary Graduate and former Warwick/RSC International Playwright in Residence for two years at the CAPITAL Centre, has won the Best Adapated Screenplay Oscar for Moonlight.

• Listen to Tarell McCraney discuss Shakespeare, the United States and the University of Warwick:

In addition to Mr McCraney's Oscar, along with co-author Barry Jenkins, Moonlight was named Best Picture.

Collecting his Honorary Doctorate in 2014 Mr McCraney spoke of his first time teaching at the CAPITAL Centre:

• "It was the students at Warwick with their generosity of spirit, their ever evolving genius and their unflinching generosity that taught me a life in the arts was a life in education, that though I had pursued the playwright's ink I still held up my family's legacy as an educator. They reminded me that it is the mind that moves the matter and that the arts are an education steeped in the human condition. They gave me the courage to return to the lecture room."

Commenting on Mc McCraney's Oscar Carol Rutter, Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies, said:

"Moonlight is a beautiful, heartbreaking, gracious and important film. Based on Tarell's life growing up in a Miami housing project, the child of a junkie mother, poor, black, gay -- and having to ask, as an 8-year-old, 'What's a "faggot"? when that's what the school bully called him.

"Tarell was 'ours' for two years, while he was at the CAPTIAL Centre as the Warwick/RSC International Playwright in Residence (2008-09). And he remains 'ours', having accepted an Honorary Doctorate in 2014.

"He once told me that he'd been told by a hero of his that 'black men loving each other' was 'a revolutionary act'. Moonlight puts that 'revolutionary act' out there, to let all of us see -- men, women; black, brown, white; hetero, homo, bi; and everything in between -- that loving is what humans do best. It's what makes us human."

Watch Mr McCraney's speech, including the oration by Professor Carol Rutter, below:

27 February 2017

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