Biography

Alana valentine

Alana Valentine is a librettist, playwright and director.

In 2021 she wrote and directed the Sydney Festival/Walkleys Award series THE JOURNALIST GENE, innovating a new form of interview panel with performance elements. As co-writer, with Ursula Yovich, of Barbara and the Camp Dogs she was awarded both a 2019 Helpmann Award and 2020 Green Room Award for Best Original Score, as well as a Helpmann for Best Musical and Green Room for Best New Australian Work. In 2019 Alana wrote the libretto for the critically acclaimed song cycle Flight Memory with composer Sandra France and many of her award-winning plays feature original songs including The Sugar House, Head Full of Love and Ladies Day.

Alana also works as dramaturg with Bangarra Dance Theatre and was part of the creative team for their Helpmann Award winning best new Australian work, Bennelong for which she wrote lyrics with composer Steve Francis, as well as working as dramaturg on their dance theatre productions of DARK EMU, PATYEGARANG, and ID (Belong).

In 2019 the Seymour Centre in Australia presented Made To Measure, a commission from the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, where Alana was Writer in Residence. Alana has been awarded four Australian Writers Guild awards and a Churchill Fellowship and she previously worked with six First Nations singers on the narrative concert Barefoot Divas: Walk A Mile In My Shoes. She has also received a Centenary Medal for her work on the Centenary of Federation, a Cultural Leadership Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and a Literature Fund Fellowship.

‘Valentine, an essential Australian dramatist, who writes the marginalised and oft-persecuted fringes of Australia into our dramatic canon with long-denied dignity and grace.’

– TIME OUT MAGAZINE

In 2019 and 2020, Alana and Ursula were funded by Screen Australia to write the screenplay adaptation of Barbara and the Camp Dogs, to be produced by Bunya Productions. In 2020 she secured development funding from SBS TV to work with Blake Ayshford and Alice Addison on a TV series Lady Chaplain, produced by Easy Tiger. She has written for McLeod’s Daughters and her short films are Mother Love, The Witnesses, and Reef Dreaming. Her multi-media work includes an installation at the Museum of Sydney and a water screen installation in Sydney’s Darling Harbor. Alana is a multi-award winning playwright and librettist working with Belvoir on The Sugar House (to be presented in London in October 2021 at the Finborough Theatre), with Griffin Theatre on Ladies Day (nominated for the Nick Enright Prize for Drama in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards) and The Tree Widows which won two Tasmanian Theatre Awards. In 2018 Merrigong Theatre Company toured Letters to Lindy to twenty venues in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, and the NT including Darwin and Alice Springs. In October 2018, Sport For Jove presented Ear to the Edge of Time at Seymour directed by Nadia Tass. She has more than 20 published works including two books of non-fiction – BOWERBIRD: The art of making theatre drawn from life (2018) and DEAR LINDY: A Nation Responds to the Loss of Azaria (2017) as well as been part of numerous short story and short play anthologies and collections.
ALANA valentine in front of BBC building

News

Performing History

Performing History

Playwright Alana Valentine and writer Sheila Ngoc Pham reflect on the writing of Sydney histories on the stage. Alana will speak about writing the history of Sydney institutions including the Parramatta Girls Home in her playParramatta Girls, the Pyrmont CSR Sugar...

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Send For Nellie

Send For Nellie

As part of its Pride (R)evolution exhibition, the Library will be celebrating Nellie’s 33-year career in her own words, through archival recordings and newspaper interviews, as well as the words of her contemporaries, many of whom I interviewed more than 30 years...

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2018 Philip Parsons Lecture

2018 Philip Parsons Lecture

In this year’s Phillip Parsons lecture, award-winning playwright Alana Valentine reflects on her experience of bringing into the theatre the lived experience of diverse, community, regional and local audiences to hear their own stories in the context of the...

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