The Oscar and BAFTA winning Hacksaw Ridge is leading the impressive line-up of nominees for the 50th Annual AWGIE Awards, announced this morning by the Australian Writers’ Guild.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2017, this year’s AWGIE Awards will be presented across 19 individual categories including feature film, television, documentary, theatre, animation and interactive media as well as the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by Foxtel.
Acclaimed Australian screenwriter Andrew Knight and US writer Robert Schenkkan are nominated for Hacksaw Ridge in the Feature Film (Original) category alongside Ben Young, whose debut feature film Hounds Of Love had its premiere at the 73rd Annual Venice Film Festival and also screened at the iconic SXSW Festival.
In a record-breaking year for Theatre entries, Leah Purcell‘s critically acclaimed The Drover’s Wife, which was recently awarded Book of the Year at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, is nominated in the Stage category alongside Catherine McKinnon‘s Hurt, Andrew Bovell‘s Things I Know To Be True and Stephen Carleton‘s The Turquoise Elephant. Tasmanian-based playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer is also dominant, having picked up three nominations in the Children’s Theatre and Theatre For Young Audiences categories.
Other nominees include writers from Australian dramas Wentworth, The Wrong Girl, Seven Types of Ambiguity and Janet King, as well as comedies Rosehaven, Please Like Me and No Activity.
Individual category winners will be eligible for the Major Award, given to the most outstanding script of the year. Past winners have included writers of The Code (2014 and 2016), The Water Diviner (2015), The Sapphires (2012), Animal Kingdom (2010) and Cloud Street (1999).
Individual theatre category winners are also eligible for the David Williamson Prize for Excellence in Writing for Australian Theatre, which was last year awarded to Angus Cerini for The Bleeding Tree.
Since 1968, the Australian Writers’ Guild has presented the AWGIE Awards to recognise and reward the talents, triumphs and unique contributions of Australian screen and stage writers to the Australian arts. The AWGIE Awards are the only writers’ awards judged solely by writers, based on the written script – the writer’s intention rather than the finished product.
AWGIE recipients will be announced at the 50th Annual AWGIE Awards on Friday 25 August 2017 in Sydney.
The full list of nominees are HERE.
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