photo: Emilio Madrid

LILA RAICEK is a New York based playwright.

Her hit play MY MASTER BUILDER, starring Ewan McGregor and Elizabeth Debicki, directed by Sir Michael Grandage, debuted in London’s West End in Spring 2025, with a sold-out run.

Her debut novel THE PLUNGE will be published by HarperCollins in April 2026.

In theatre: Fire Season, inspired by Measure for Measure, is in pre-production. The recent workshop starred Billy Crudup, Meghann Fahy, Victor Garber, and Patina Miller. She is currently working on Tulla, about Edvard Munch, as a commission for Broadway studio Seaview Productions.

In TV: It was just announced that Night Float, adapted from her play Vertebrae, will star Nina Dobrev, produced by Made Up Stories and Fifth Season. She is also writing original pilot 9 Parties for Fifth Season and Made Up Stories. Recently, she adapted Blinded, based on Swedish thriller Fartblinda, for Keanu Reeves to star; Three Wishes, by Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty, for NETFLIX; the NYTimes bestseller The Couple Next Door for Paramount TV and Sugar23; and 99 Days for Warner Bros. Lila wrote on Darren Star's Younger, and served as executive story editor of Gossip Girl on HBO Max.

Her other plays include: Vertebrae (New York Theatre Workshop; Araca Group’s Graduate Playwriting Award), Love Lab (inaugural Clifford Odets Ensemble Play commission), Night Float (Playwrights Horizon commission), Monkey Bowl (Manhattan Theatre Club workshop), and Blood Moon, among others.

In her poetry years, she worked as a research assistant on The Letters of Robert Lowell, Library of Congress' The Poets Laureate Anthology, and Nobel Laureate Dr. Kandel's The Age of Insight. She endured many chairs thrown at her in the Moscow Art Theatre, and Vaclav Havel once personally told her she was "the best one-legged whore" in The Beggar's Opera he'd ever seen. She was mentored by playwright Craig Lucas, and late Pulitzer Prize winning Poet Laureate Mark Strand. 

Lila holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University, and is a summa cum laude, phi beta kappa, and Centennial Scholar graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University, where she studied creative writing and a lot of poetry.