Birch was also the screenwriter for the film Lady Macbeth and has written for such television shows as Succession, Normal People, and the Peabody Award-winning miniseries Dead Ringers.
[1] Birch spent the first five years of her life living with her family at the rural commune Birchwood Hall, near Malvern.
[2] At 18, Birch joined the Royal Court Theatre’s young writers programme and spent a three-month unpaid internship in Los Angeles working for the film production company BenderSpink.
[9] Birch was nominated for the 2011/12 Susan Smith Blackburn prize, an award recognising female playwrights writing in the English language, for Many Moons.
was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which gave her the prompt, "Well-behaved women seldom make history".
[19] Birch was nominated for the 2014/15 Susan Smith Blackburn prize for writing Revolt and won the George Devine Award for Most Promising New Playwright.
[33] Birch was also nominated for a BAFTA and for Best Debut Screenwriter at the British Independent Film Awards for Lady Macbeth.
[37][38] Also that year, Birch and British director Katie Mitchell adapted Elfriede Jelinek's Schatten (Eurydike sagt) (Shadow (Eurydice Speaks) in English).
[39][40] In 2017, Birch's play Anatomy of a Suicide premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London under the direction of Katie Mitchell.
[42] Anatomy of a Suicide follows three generations of women affected by mental illness in the 1970s, 1990s, and the 2030s whose stories are presented to the audience simultaneously.
[53] Birch's opera, Violet, composed by Tom Coult, was scheduled to open at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2020.
[54][55] The opera was commissioned and produced by Music Theatre Wales, Theater Magdeburg, and Snape Maltings, with the London Sinfonietta.
Jude Christian's production starred soprano Anna Dennis as Violet with accompaniment by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Andrew Gourlay.
[62] In October 2020, her adaptation of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy was set to be directed by Mitchell at the National Theatre.
[63][64] In August 2020, it was announced that Birch would write the television reimagining of Dead Ringers, set to star Rachel Weisz.
[65] The miniseries went on to win a Peabody Award for "aptly packaging a bold adaptation of this twinned-body horror classic within the continued nightmarish world of women’s reproductive health care in the United States.