Maxine Mellor is an award-winning playwright and teaching artist. In 2022, she received the David Williamson Prize for Playwriting and the AWGIE Award for Best Original Stage Play for ‘Horizon’ with Playlab Theatre. Her work has been performed nationally and internationally and is published by Playlab Press and Australian Plays Transform. When did you first realise you wanted to…
Continue readingScreenwriters Jane Jago and Kayti Murphy have been announced as the winners of the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Monte Miller Awards, the premier awards for unproduced scripts in Australia. Returning to Melbourne for the first time in three years, the Awards were announced to a packed room of buzzing industry decision-makers, producers and Guild members, who spent the evening…
Continue readingJames Cripps received the long form Monte Miller Award last year for his series High Rotation, and since then has worked on the upcoming NCIS: Sydney and been a finalist in the 2021 AACTA Pitch: Bite competition. When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?I was in Year 7 and I thought it was time to decide…
Continue readingThe Australian Writers’ Guild has taken a firm stand against the unregulated use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Australia’s creative industries, issuing a position paper outlining the imminent threat posed by AI and an extensive framework for the appropriate regulation of its use to protect workers and audiences. As the world learns that the Writers…
Continue readingEarlier this week, the Atlantic published a search tool that allowed authors to search for their books in a dataset that has been used to train generative-AI systems. The search tool can be accessed here. The dataset – ‘Books3’ – contains approximately 183,000 pirated books, plays and other literary works. Generative AI systems have been developed or trained by scraping, or…
Continue readingThe Australian Writers’ Guild has taken a firm stand against the unregulated use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Australia’s creative industries, issuing a position paper outlining the imminent threat posed by AI and an extensive framework for the appropriate regulation of its use to protect workers and audiences. As the world learns that the Writers…
Continue readingEarlier this week, the Atlantic published a search tool that allowed authors to search for their books in a dataset that has been used to train generative-AI systems. The search tool can be accessed here. The dataset – ‘Books3’ – contains approximately 183,000 pirated books, plays and other literary works. Generative AI systems have been developed or trained by scraping, or…
Continue readingAWG EVENTS JoJo Zhou in Conversation with Ellen JurikIn the lead up to Melbourne International Games Week, we’re embracing all things Narrative Design! All are welcome to this enlightening and timely conversation between two playwrights-turned-narrative-designers, JoJo Zhou and Ellen Jurik. Monday 25 September 2.30pm AEST, online – BOOK HERE Narrative Direction – Get Pitch ReadyMelbourne International…
Continue readingThe President of the Australian Writers’ Guild, Shane Brennan has welcomed the tentative agreement between the WGA and the AMPTP which could end the long running writers’ strike in the U.S. ‘Australian writers join with film and television industry workers everywhere in applauding both the WGA and the AMPTP in hammering out an agreement to…
Continue readingTom Hegarty, an admired pioneer of Australian television writing, has died in Sydney at the age of 88. In an era when dramatic writing was not considered a proper career, Tom wrote in the evenings while working as a traveling salesman for Lever Brothers in Queensland. Like many in the 1960s, Tom got his first…
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