Andrew James Wilson (2 August 1948 – 3 July 2013), better known as Snoo Wilson, was an English playwright, screenwriter and director. His early plays such as Blow-Job (1971) were overtly political, often combining harsh social comment with comedy. In his later works he moved away from purely political themes, embracing a range of surrealist, magical, philosophical and madcap, darkly comic subjects.

After studying literature at the University of East Anglia, Wilson began his writing career in 1969. He began to build his reputation with a series of plays and screenplays in the early 1970s and was a founder of Portable Theatre Company, a touring company concentrating on experimental theatre. In the mid-1970s, he served as dramaturge to the Royal Shakespeare Company and produced one of his best-regarded plays, The Soul of the White Ant. In 1978, his surrealist play The Glad Hand attracted favourable notice, as did his 1994 play, Darwin's Flood, among others. He continued to write plays and screenplays until the end of his life, including for the Bush Theatre. He also wrote several novels and held teaching positions.

Wilson was born in Reading, the son of two teachers: Leslie Wilson and his wife Pamela Mary née Boyle. Snoo was a childhood nickname. He was educated at Bradfield College, where his father taught, and the University of East Anglia (UEA), graduating with a degree in American and English Literature in 1969. At UEA, he was a student of Lorna Sage and Malcolm Bradbury. Wilson's early plays, the one-act Girl Mad as Pigs and the two-act Ella Daybellfesse's Machine, were first produced at UEA in, respectively, June and November 1967. Two years later, a second one-act play, Between the Acts, was first produced in Canterbury, at the University of Kent.

In 1969, Wilson embarked on a writing career. Together with Tony Bicat and David Hare, Wilson founded the Portable Theatre Company, a touring company concentrating on experimental theatre, and was its associate director from 1970 to 1975. His plays from these years included four one-act works, Charles the Martyr (1970), Device of Angels (1970), Pericles, The Mean Knight (1970) and Reason (1972), most of which dealt with overtly political subjects.

Wilson's first full-length works to attract notice were Pignight and Blow-Job, both produced in 1971, in which "Horror and farce sat side by side." Pignight, the first of his own plays that Wilson directed, is a nightmarish fantasy about a mentally disturbed former soldier, who, while on a Lincolnshire pig farm, believes that pigs are about to take over the world. Dusty Hughes called it "a vivid and emetic portrait of rural change and urban corruption". Critic Michael Billington described it as a "savage and disenchanted portrait of rural life". Blow-Job is a political exploration of urban violence during which a quantity of raw meat is thrown on stage to simulate the corpse of an Alsatian dog that has just been blown up. With some reservations, Irving Wardle praised the piece in The Times for its "authentic sense of horror … its intermingling of physical outrage and savage farce."

In Wilson's 1973 full-length play, The Pleasure Principle, comedy, politics and social comment were again combined, but to less savage effect. Billington wrote, "On the one hand it is a strenuous indictment of ownership, property, greed and personal exploitation: on the other, it is a madhouse extravaganza that operates on the good old comic principle of always putting a bomb under the audience's expectations." In The Observer, Robert Cushman wrote, "This is one of the best plays of the seventies' heartless school; Coward's Design for Living is a fount of charity by comparison." Other full-length plays of this period were Vampire (1973) written for Paradise Foundry, The Beast (1974), staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Everest Hotel (1975) for Bush Theatre, which he also directed. In the 1970s, Wilson's plays fell from favour with theatre producers who were looking for more commercial projects.

Wilson was successful with screenplays and teleplays in the 1970s, including Sunday for Seven Days (1971), The Good Life (1971), More About the Universe (1972), Swamp Music (1973), The Barium Meal (1974), The Trip to Jerusalem (1974), Don't Make Waves (1975) and A Greenish Man (1979). In 1975 and 1976, he was dramaturge to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and in 1976 he married the journalist Ann McFerran, a theatre critic, with whom he had two sons, Patrick and David, and a daughter, Jo. In the same year, he became script editor of the BBC television anthology drama series, Play for Today. A play that year, The Soul of the White Ant, starring Simon Callow, was first produced at the Soho Poly. It is a dramatic treatment of a racial murder in South Africa and the ensuing cover-up by the police and the press. A white woman has an affair with a Black lover and then shoots him. It is "possibly [Wilson's] masterpiece".

In 1978, The Glad Hand, in which a South African tycoon employs a troupe of actors and sails an oil tanker through the Bermuda Triangle, hoping to conjure up the Anti-Christ and kill him in a Wild West gunfight, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and won the John Whiting Award. Cushman wrote, "Sceptics like me have sometimes fallen foul of Mr Wilson's concern with the occult; here he makes it easy for us. Like Tom Stoppard he sets up impossible situations and explains them; and his wit in this piece has a Stoppardian exhilaration." Later that year, Wilson was appointed Henfield Fellow at the University of East Anglia.