2021 STC Patrick White Playwrights Award & Fellowship

Sydney Theatre Company is calling on Australia’s talented playwrights to apply for the 2021 Patrick White Playwrights Award and the Patrick White Playwrights Fellowship. The prizes are designed to benefit both emerging and established writers and have a total prize pool of $32,500.

The Patrick White Playwrights Award, established in 2000, is held in honour of Patrick White’s contribution to Australian theatre and to foster the development of Australian playwrights. The Award offers a cash prize of $7,500 for a full-length, unproduced play of any genre written by an Australian playwright over 18 years of age. The readers and judges assessing the scripts seek a work that is original and ambitious with strong theatrical potential. Previous award-winners include Ra Chapman, Keziah Warner, Mark Rogers, Kim Ho, Anna Barnes and Melissa Bubnic.

The Patrick White Playwrights Fellowship was introduced in 2010 to recognise and support more established Australian playwrights. The $25,000 Fellowship is awarded anually to an established playwright whose work has been produced professionally in Australia within the last four years. The tenure includes a commission from STC, which each Fellow develops during their year-long engagement, and opportunities for the playwright to share their skills with other playwrights and artists including the STC Emerging Writers Group. Previous Fellows include Angus Cerini, Anchuli Felicia King and Nakkiah Lui.

The winners of the Award and the Fellowship will be announced at an event in May 2022 along with a reading of the Patrick White Playwrights Award-winning play.

Submissions for the 2021 Patrick White Playwrights Award are now open. The closing date for entries is Monday 29 November 2021 at 5pm. Expressions of interest for the Fellowship are open on a rolling basis.

The 2020 recipient of the Patrick White Playwrights Award was Ra Chapman for her play K-BOX – a surreal comedy that follows a young woman who flees her collapsing life in Melbourne to stay with her adoptive baby boomer parents in country Victoria. The 2020 Patrick White Fellow is Angus Cerini, well known to STC audiences for his plays The Bleeding Tree (2017) and Wonnangatta (2020).

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