Peta Murray

Peta Murray is a graduate of the NSW School of Drama and has a Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney. She began work as a high-school teacher, and was involved with fringe and community theatre throughout her teaching career. She also worked as an actor, writer and director in street and community theatre, stand-up comedy, theatre-in-education and feminist reviews.

Peta’s best-known play is Wallflowering. This play has been in almost continuous production since its premiere in 1989, with seasons in New Zealand, UK, USA and across Australia.

Since then she has written numerous plays for young people, including Spitting Chips, and an adaptation of Tim Winton’s Blueback, both of which won Australian Writers Guild Industry Awards (AWGIES). Community theatre works include This Dying Business and The Keys to the Animal Room, which won a 1994 AWGIE. Other works include The Procedure, The Diver, Stormy Night, The Law of Large Numbers, and Salt, which won both the Australian National Playwright’s Centre/New Dramatists Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama.

In 2003 Peta was awarded a Centenary Medal for services to society and literature, and in 2004 an Australia Council grant took her to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris for a six-month residency. 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.

Peta works as freelance dramaturg and director and has taught playwriting at Melbourne University and RMIT. She is currently co-facilitator of The Black Writers Lab for Ilbijerri Theatre, Melbourne. Several of her plays are published by Currency Press. She is currently completing a new work for theatre entitled: Things That Fall Over: an (anti-)musical of a novel inside a reading of a play with footnotes and oratorio-as-coda.