Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 07 July
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Each year the country’s peak academic body for Australian writing - Association for the Study of Australian Literature - comes together to unpick and discuss the ideas and climate of our literary world. This year, two of their sessions are open to the public through the Wheeler Centre.
Between the academy and the marketplace, how well do we look after our playwrights, and what is the health of our theatre community? Raimondo Cortese, Hannie Rayson, Lally Katz and Jenny Kemp discuss the dramas of drama with Dr Denise Varney.
Featuring
Lally Katz
Lally Katz is an award-winning Melbourne based playwright. Her play Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd premiered at Malthouse Theatre and won the Louis Esson Prize for Drama at the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Lally is a graduate of the University of Melbourne’s School of Studies in Creative Arts and she studied playwriting at London’s Royal Court Theatre. She is a core member of Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre which has built a reputation as one of the country’s most exciting theatre companies. Lally’s newest work, three short plays featuring one of her recurring characters, The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, recently opened as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Recently Lally adapted selected stories from the bible, forming parts one and three (co-adapter) of The Mysteries: Genesis directed by Matthew Lutton and Tom Wright premiering at Sydney Theatre Company. Lally’s play When The Hunter Returns was commissioned and produced by The Gaiety School of Acting in Ireland and had a return season at the Dublin Theatre Festival.
Lally has active commissions with, Company B, Malthouse Theatre, Arena Theatre Company and continues to develop a new work, 9 Days Falling, with New York playwright Mac Wellman. She has been awarded a British Council Realise Your Dreams grant for 2010.
Hannie Rayson
Hannie Rayson is a playwright and screenwriter best known for Hotel Sorrento.
Hannie Rayson has established a reputation for topical, complex dramas written with wit and insight. A graduate of Melbourne University and the Victorian College of the Arts, she has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from La Trobe University.
Her plays have been extensively performed around Australia and internationally. They include Mary, Room to Move, Hotel Sorrento, Falling From Grace, Scenes from a Separation (co-written with Andrew Bovell), Competitive Tenderness, Life After George, Inheritance, Two Brothers, The Glass Soldier and The Swimming Club. She has been awarded two Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, four Helpmann Awards, two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award as well as the Age Performing Arts Award and The Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award.
For television she has written Sloth (ABC, Seven Deadly Sins) and co-written two episodes of SeaChange. A feature film of Hotel Sorrento, produced in 1995, was nominated for ten Australian Film Institute Awards. In 1999 she received the Magazine Publishers' Society of Australia’s Columnist of the Year Award for her regular contributions to HQ magazine.
Hannie made playwriting history when Life After George was the first play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 and 2009 she was nominated for the Melbourne Prize for Literature, a prize for a Victoria-based writer whose body of published or produced work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.
She has recently completed a commission for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. Her new play is called Extinction.