Sydney news

Nicki Bloom is the recipient of the 2008 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award for her play, Bloodwood. Sydney Theatre Company Co Artistic Director Andrew Upton announced the winner ahead of a rehearsed reading of the play at Wharf 2 on 23 May 2009 as part of the Sydney Writer’s Festival.

Bloodwood deals with concepts as diverse as language, history, faith, memory and nationhood, through the prism of two very different, although unequivocally connected worlds; the world of the 1893 New Australia utopian colony in Paraguay, and an imagined world which exists simultaneously in the deep past and the deep future.

Describing the Award as a great honour, Bloom said it was “made all the more special by the fact that Patrick White is a guiding light for me, in terms of the way he created real, felt and immeasurably beautiful worlds from the most basic tool we as writers have at our disposal - language.”

The judges were Alison Croggon (writer and poet), Hilary Bell (playwright), Clare Morgan (Arts Editor, The Sydney Morning Herald), and Andrew Upton (Co Artistic Director, Sydney Theatre Company).

Extending congratulations to Bloom and to all the shortlisted playwrights this year, on behalf of the judges Alison Croggon said: “The diversity of the approaches to theatre evident in these scripts demonstrates the lively state of Australian play writing. These plays were especially notable for their attention to the poetic qualities of both language and theatre, and for their willingness to play with the imaginative potential of the stage.”

The $20,000 Award is an initiative of Sydney Theatre Company and The Sydney Morning Herald established in 2000 in honour of Patrick White’s contribution to theatre and to foster the development of Australian playwrights. To date, 15 writers have shared in the Award from over 1600 entries. Previous winners include Angus Cerini for Wretch, Timothy Daly for The Man in the Attic, Patricia Cornelius for Do Not Go Gentle…, Wesley Enoch for The Story of the Miracle at Cookie’s Table and Stephen Carleton for Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset.

Nicki Bloom’s debut play Tender has been performed at B-Sharp, Hothouse Theatre (Albury/Wodonga) and Griffin Theatre (Sydney). The play will have its international debut in July at the Public Theater, New York City, as part of the Summer Festival. Her adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was produced by the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Bloom’s awards include the 2006 Adrian Consett Stephen Memorial Prize (Tender), the 2007 Inscription Chairman’s Award for Best Play (Tender), the 2009 Inscription Playwriting Award (Bloodwood) and the 2006 Henry Lawson Prize for Prose, for Something Greater Than All of This, a fragment of her debut novel An Archipelago.