Patrick White Playwrights’ Fellowship and Award winners announced

The winner of the Patrick White Playwrights’ Fellowship was announced at a special event at Sydney Theatre Company on Friday 18 May.

Patricia Cornelius was honoured with the year long, $25,000 Fellowship, which is designed to acknowledge on individual for their commitment and dedication to Australian playwriting throughout their career. It assists an established playwright to expand and progress their career as well as enabling them to share their skills with their fellow playwrights.

The Fellowship, inaugurated last year, is offered by STC along with the Patrick White Playwright’s Award which has been running since 2000.

Phillip Kavanagh was announced winner of the Award, a $7,500 prize for a unproduced script, for his Little Borders. After the announcements, a rehearsed reading of Little Borders was presented at The Wharf as part of the Sydney Writers Festival.

In 2006 Patricia Cornelius won the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award with her play Do Not Go Gentle. Other plays include The Call (Melbourne Workers Theatre, Griffin), Love (Hothouse/Malthouse) Fever (co-written, Melbourne Workers Theatre), Boy Overboard (ATYP) and Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (Co-written with Andrew Bovell, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Reeves and Irine Vela – Melbourne Workers Theatre). She co-wrote the feature film adaptation for Blessed, based on the play Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? and she is currently adapting a novel into a feature film. Her novel My Sister Jill was published by Random House.

Phillip Kavanagh is a Sydney-based playwright from Adelaide. Little Borders, a play about two characters who seek refuge from the outside world in a fortified and walled off community,  is his first play and was written as the creative component of a Master of Arts thesis at Flinders University. It received further development through PlayWriting Australia’s National Script Workshop. Phillip was the 2011 recipient of the Colin Thiele Creative Writing Scholarship, awarded by Carclew Youth Arts. He is currently completing a Graduate Diploma of Dramatic Art (Playwriting) at NIDA.