photo credit: Emilio Madrid

LILA RAICEK is a New York based playwright. Her new play MY MASTER BUILDER, starring Ewan McGregor and directed by Michael Grandage, will make its debut on London’s West End in April 2025. Her debut novel THE PLUNGE, a seductive literary thriller, will be published by HarperCollins in Summer 2025.

Fire Season, a new play inspired by Measure for Measure, is in pre-production. The most recent workshop starred Billy Crudup, Meghann Fahy, Victor Garber, and Patina Miller. She is currently working on Tulla, a play about Edvard Munch, for Broadway production company Seaview.

In TV, Lila is penning two original pilots, 9 Parties and Pulse, for Fifth Season and Bruna Pappandrea’s 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 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 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 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.