At the 46th Annual AWGIE Awards held in Melbourne, the night belonged to Alana Valentine, with a side order of an enormously tall playwright and a Federal Minister of the Arts with a short speech.
Alana Valentine was nominated for a Radio: Adaptation Award, and for Theatre: Community and Youth Theatre. She won for the latter and was then coshed from behind not once but twice, with the inaugural David Williamson prize for outstanding theatre writing, for which she probably pinched herself 25,000 times, once for every dollar in the cheque. Then she bookended the night with the Grand Prize, often a trap for a writer who has already taken to the bottle to celebrate an earlier victory.
