Entries open for Australia’s richest sci-fi screenwriting award.

03 August, 2021

The 2021 John Hinde Award for Excellence in Science-Fiction Writing is open for entries, seeking those writers whose work pushes the boundaries of our imagination, exploring the terrible, the exhilarating, and all the shades in-between.

The richest science-fiction screenwriting award in Australia, the John Hinde Award offers $10,000 for the best produced script of the previous year and professional support for the best unproduced script of 2021. It is open to all AWG members, including Full, Associate, and Student members. 

Funded by a bequest from the late Australian film critic John Hinde, the Award was established to encourage, reward and foster creativity in the development and showcasing of Australian science-fiction writing for film, television, web series and interactive media.

Entries open Tuesday 27 July 2021 and close Monday 6 September 2021. For more information and to enter download the information kit and guidelines HERE. 

Past winners in the produced category include Shelley Birse's gripping climate fiction series The Commons, Lucas Taylor's AWGIE Award-winning multilinear narrative experience Eleven Eleven, the late Cris Jones' feature The Death and Life of Otto Bloom, and Episode Five of the acclaimed Indigenous series Cleverman by Michael Miller.

In the unproduced category, 2020 winner David Petersen and 2019 winner Steve Mitchell have been inducted onto AWG’s Pathways Showcase and continue to develop their projects, while 2018 winner Georgina Love was awarded a scholarship by Final Draft to attend the Rocaberti Writers’ Retreat in the south of France, and won the Screencraft Screenwriters Fellowship. 2017 winner C.S. McMullen (Awake) saw her debut feature, The Other Lamb, premiere at Toronto International Film Festival in 2019. She is a writer on the recent horror anthology series Two Sentence Horror Stories for The CW/Warner Brothers Digital.