Shelagh Delaney was born in Salford, Lancashire. She is most well-known for A Taste of Honey, for which she won the Foyle's New Play Award and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. She wrote the screenplay for the film version with Tony Richardson and was awarded the British Film Academy Award and the Robert Flaherty Award. Her other screenplays include The White Bus and Charley Bubbles, for which she won the Writers' Guild Award. She has also written for television and radio and has had a collection of short stories published. She died in 2011.

A sensational theatrical success in London, A Taste of Honey was written by Shelagh Delaney at the age of 18. The play prompted Graham Greene to say that it had "all the freshness of Mr. Osborne's Look Back In Anger and a greater maturity." A Taste of Honey won Miss Delaney two national awards, the sale of film rights productions at Stratford, London, and Paris, and a round of applause from the critics. The play is the story of a working-class, adolescent girl and her relationships with the Black sailor who makes her pregnant; the homosexual art student who moves into her apartment to help her through her pregnancy; her fun-loving, saloon-frequenting mother; and Peter, her mother's newly acquired husband. Jo moves, in a very detached way, within this economic and emotional whirlpool. Miss Delaney translates these emo-tionally charged situations into a non-sentimental and realistic play.