Started in 1986 and organized by Zbigniew Rudziński, the competition aims to add new plays to the repertory of theatres working for young audiences. There have been two international editions so far. The play competition is an integral project in the policy of the Children’s Art Centre of Poznan and aims to inspire and promote contemporary playwriting

The Children’s Art Centre has been operating since 1984 when the Minister of Art and Culture established in Poznan the National Centre of Art for Children and Young People as a cultural institution of a nationwide character. Its raison d’etre is to inspire the creation of professional art for children and young people, to promote new valuable artistic performances, to popularize and aid in the development of new methods of cultural awareness education. In 1999 the Centre changed its Statute and its name to the Children's Art Centre in Poznan

The National New Play Network (NNPN) is the country’s leading alliance of nonprofit theaters that champions the development, production and continued life of new plays.  NNPN strives to pioneer, implement and disseminate ideas and programs that revolutionize the way theaters collaborate to support new plays and playwrights.  Since its founding in 1998, NNPN has paid nearly a half million dollars to theaters and playwrights, providing employment for hundreds of artists across the country where NNPN’s 26 member theaters are located and beyond.

Playmarket is putting a special effort into gathering and co-ordinating the best of all plays that fall into this category, from adaptations of fairy tales for tiny children, to plays written by teachers especially for the classroom, to the most searing explorations of adolescence written by teenagers themselves - with no limits on length or cast size. They aim to encourage strong, original and inventive writing for young people both from those new to writing for the young, and the experienced.

Since the foundation of the Children’s and Young People’s Theatre Centre, promoting playwrights has been at the heart of its work. This involvement in supporting authors and their work is based on the fact that the artistic quality in children’s and young people’s theatre corresponds closely to the quality of its dramatic literature. With writing workshops, the Paul-Maar-Stipendium (Paul Maar Grant), the Deutscher Kindertheaterpreis (German Children’s Theatre Prize) and the Deutscher Jugendtheaterpreis (German Young People’s Theatre Prize) or the exchange with other European playwrights, the Centre has developed a range of promotional activities which is crowned every year by the Frankfurter Autorenforum für Kinder- und Jugendtheater (Frankfurt Playwrights Forum for Children’s and Young People’s Theatre).

Now in its fourteenth season, the New Plays for Young Audiences (NPYA) play reading series focuses more specifically on the development of scripts for child and young people's audiences. The creative vision of the Program in Educational Theatre's co-founders, Lowell and Nancy Swortzell, was to establish a program to encourage the development of plays for youth written by both NYU students and noted authors in the U.S. and abroad.