Women of Words

Excluding the Bible and the works of Willliam Shakespeare, who are the world’s best-selling authors of all time?  Hint, women dominate the top ten.

Coming in at number 1, The late Dame Agatha Christie, whose 78 crime novels and handful of romances under the pseudonym Mary Westmacot have sold an estimated 2 billion copies in 44 languages.

If you guessed JK Rowling is next, you’re wrong!  While KT Rowling’s Harry Potter series are popular and have sold a lot of copies, she’s not even close to coming in second or third to Agatha Christie in sales.  Historical romance author Barbara Cartland, with 723 titles to her name, and Danielle Steel, with 182 primarily romance novels and 18 children’s books, can both claim over a billion sold.

For the record, Rowling is in the middle of the list, behind Harold Robbins and Belgian mystery writer Georges Simenon.

The Harry Potter series is no slouch when it comes to sales. More than 600 million have been sold worldwide in 85 languages, with every title topping the New York Times and USA Today Bestseller list, and the seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, selling 8.3 million copies in the first 24 hours breaking all publishing records. 

What playwright holds the record for the longest running play? Yes, Dame Agatha for the win!   

A women is the author of the world’s longest continuously running play.

In addition to her novels Agatha Christie wrote 19 plays, including The Mousetrap which passed 30,000 performances in 2025.  It’s been seen by over 10 million theatergoers since its opening night in 1952. 

Stop by Broadway’s Lena Horne Theater for Six The Musical, composed and co-written by Lucy Moss. Moss was just 26 when she and her writing partner Toby Marlow created this musical about King Henry’s six wives. Debuting at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it won world-wide attention with the show’s songs garnering 100 million streams. Six made its Broadway debut in October of 2020. 

Mitchell earned Tony nominations for both Best Score and Best Book for her revolutionary musical Hadestown.  She blends American folk and New Orleans jazz in this trip to the underworld that reimagines the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with the story of Hades and Persephone.  

Mitchell was the first woman in years to have sole credit on a Broadway show and she picked up the Tony for Best Musical. 

Playwright and screenwriter, Lynn Nottage is the first and only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat.

Dramas with dark humor, Ruined explores the plight of women during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo while Sweat brings together working class characters in a Pennsylvania factory town, yet Nottage is no stranger to musicals.  Before tackling the story of Michael Jackson, she wrote the book for the prize-winning musical adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's bestseller, The Secret Life of Bees.  MJ the Musical is now playing at the Neil Simon Theater.

Substack theater magazine The Scene has compiled a list of Fifty Women Playwrights Every Theater Person Should Know.