Name Peta Murray Role Playwright | Education Killara High School | |
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Books Wallflowering, Spitting Chips, Salt: A Play in Five Helpings | ||
Peta Murray is an Australian writer. Best known as a playwright, she also writes short stories, and is a dramaturg, director and occasional teacher of writing.
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Early life
She graduated from Killara High School, Sydney in 1975. She graduated from the NSW School of Drama, and has a Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney. She began work as a high-school teacher of English and History, and involved herself in fringe and community theatre throughout her teaching career. In 1989, she began writing full-time.
Playwright
Murray's play The Procrastinator was produced by the Griffin Theatre Company in 1981. Her best-known play, Wallflowering, was workshopped at the Australian National Playwrights' Conference in 1988, and has since had numerous productions in Australia and overseas. Other works include Salt, Spitting Chips (an adaptation of Tim Winton’s Blueback), The Procedure and The Keys to the Animal Room produced by Junction Theatre Company in South Australia.
Community theatre works include This Dying Business produced by Junction Theatre Company and The Law of Large Numbers by Mainstreet Theatre company in Mount Gambier. In 2006, she wrote Room, for Playworks and the Melbourne Writers Festival. In 2010 two ‘micro-plays’ featured in Finucane & Smith’s The Carnival of Mysteries at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. She is currently developing a new work for performance entitled Things That Fall Over: an (anti-)musical of a novel inside a reading of a play, with footnotes, and oratorio-as-coda.
Other activities
Murray also works as a freelance dramaturg and director, and has taught playwriting at the University of Melbourne, at RMIT University, and as co-facilitator of The Black Writers Lab for Ilbijerri Theatre. She has taught writing at the University of Western Australia Extension Service, and spent eight weeks as Writer in the Community at Araluen Centre for Arts and Entertainment in Alice Springs in 1991.
She is co-founder and Creative Consultant of The GroundSwell Project. Several of her plays are published by Currency Press. Her short stories have been published by Sleepers, and by Scribe.
Awards
Her play Salt won the 2001 Louis Esson Prize for Drama in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.
Murray has won Australian Writers' Guild awards for Spitting Chips (Theatre in Education/Community Theatre Category, 1990), Keys to the Animal Room, (Theatre in Education/Community Theatre Category and Major Award Winner, 1994) and Blueback (Theatre for Young People, 2000).
In 2003, Murray was awarded a Centenary Medal for services to society and literature.