Sarah Kane (3 February 1971 – 20 February 1999) was an English playwright. She is known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action.

Kane herself and scholars of her work, such as Graham Saunders, have identified some of her inspirations as expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy. The critic Aleks Sierz saw her work as part of a confrontational style and sensibility of drama termed "in-yer-face theatre". Sierz originally called Kane "the quintessential in-yer-face writer of the [1990s]" but later remarked in 2009 that although he initially "thought she was very typical of the new writing of the middle 1990s", "[t]he further we get away from that in time, the more un-typical she seems to be".

Kane's published work consists of five plays, the short film Skin, and two newspaper articles for The Guardian.

Born in Brentwood, Essex, and raised by evangelical parents, Kane was a committed Christian in adolescence. Later, however, she rejected those beliefs. After attending Shenfield High School she studied drama at Bristol University, graduating in 1992, and went on to take an MA course in play writing at the University of Birmingham, led by the playwright David Edgar.

She praised Jeremy Weller's Mad as "the one piece of theatre that changed my life".

Kane wrote consistently throughout her adult life. For a year she was writer-in-residence for Paines Plough, a theatre company promoting new writing, where she actively encouraged other writers. Before that, she had worked briefly as literary associate for the Bush Theatre, London.

Kane originally wanted to be a poet, but decided that she was unable to convey her thoughts and feelings through poetry. She wrote that she was attracted to the stage because "theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts. No doubt that is why I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a dark room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind".

Kane's first play was Blasted. Kane wrote the first two scenes while a student in Birmingham, where they were given a public performance. The agent Mel Kenyon was in the audience and subsequently represented Kane, suggesting she should show her work to the Royal Court Theatre in London. The completed play, directed by James Macdonald, opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1995. The action is set in a room of a luxurious hotel in Leeds where Ian, a racist and foul-mouthed middle-aged journalist, tries to seduce Cate, an innocent, simple-minded young woman. From its opening in a naturalistic—though troubling—world, the play takes on different, nightmarish dimensions when a soldier, armed with a sniper's rifle, appears in the room. The narrative ultimately breaks into a series of increasingly disturbing short scenes. Its scenes of anal rape, cannibalism, and other forms of brutality, created one of the biggest theatre scandals in London since Edward Bond's Saved in 1965. Kane admired Bond's work, and he in turn publicly defended Kane's play and talent. Other dramatists whom Kane particularly liked and who could be seen as influences include Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, and Georg Büchner, whose play Woyzeck she later directed (Gate Theatre, London 1997).