Currency Press,  The performing arts publisher

Currency Press is Australia’s foremost publisher of the performing arts and its oldest active independent publisher. Our books include plays, screenplays, critical studies on theatre and film, practical guides and manuals on acting and auditioning, learning dialects, using drama to improve literacy and language, teaching drama and creating drama with young people. 

Currency Press was founded in 1971 by Katharine Brisbane, then national theatre critic for The Australian, and her husband Philip Parsons, a lecturer in Drama at UNSW who worked passionately to bridge the gap between the university and the profession. After Philip’s death in 1993, Katharine remained at the helm of the company until she retired as Publisher in December 2001 in order to devote her energies to Currency House, a non-profit association dedicated to stimulating, enriching and advancing the quality and enjoyment of the Australian performing arts.

Mission Statement
 

Currency Press is first and foremost a commercial publisher of Australian plays, particularly new writing, and books about Australian theatre for the school education market. The school curriculum is the source of most of its sales, however the company also supports and encourages all aspects of the Australian performing arts, including those areas with which its founders were particularly engaged – theatre criticism, theatre history, experiments in performance, new writing and policy development. Within the bounds of what is commercially prudent, this support may take the form of festivals, conferences, lobbying and other advocacy and occasional publications. We strive to nurture the talents of our authors, encourage their passion, imagination and creativity and provide our readers with the best new work available in the belief that they enrich our culture and ultimately increase our sales. We are a part of Australia’s cultural ecosystem and commit to treating our peers with dignity and respect. We want all voices to be heard. Inclusivity is crucial to the success of our industry and we look to our writers to reflect and test us in their work. We aim to provide support for playwrights, theatre makers and everyone who loves the theatre and inspire an appetite for the performing arts in all Australians by putting a playscript into the hands of every school child, tertiary student, practitioner, theatre goer and general reader. Our goal is always to expand our readership, including internationally, particularly through the new opportunities offered by digital publication.

A Brief History
 

Currency Press has been publishing in the performing arts since 1971, with 475 titles now available, of which 430 are plays or play collections. We are Australia’s oldest active independent publisher, and unique in Australia in subsisting on the work of the performing arts. We publish approximately 30 books per year, the majority of which are plays. We are unusual for a trade publisher in that our front list titles are not designed for large sales on publication, but often take years to establish themselves. (Please see attached list of bestsellers.) The bulk of our sales come from the education market. Currency was founded by Katharine Brisbane, then a theatre critic for the Australian, and Philip Parsons, a lecturer in Drama at UNSW to help capture the work of the New Wave theatre. They were motivated by an understanding that publication would help to disseminate these plays to a wide, potentially international audience, and in doing so, help to promote playwrights and theatre more generally. Without publication, it is easy for plays to disappear and their writers to be ignored. Over the years publication has helped to connect the work of playwrights to the literary community. In 1998 Alma De Groen was the first playwright to win the Patrick White Literary Award – an honour subsequently bestowed on John Romeril (2008) and Louis Nowra (2013). In 2001 Hannie Rayson was the first playwright to be shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. More recently, Mary Ann Butler’s play Broken (2016) and Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife (2017) won the Victorian Prize for Literature in consecutive years, with The Drover’s Wife also winning the New South Wales Book of the Year. In 2020 S. Shakthidharan’s Counting and Cracking won both the Victorian prize for Literature and the Prize for Drama at the Premier’s Awards. Currency’s key achievement is producing a body of published work that has made Australian plays more accessible to the public for performance, reading, studying and posterity. In 1971, Philip Parsons, wrote: ‘It is because we believe in the importance of what our new drama (and, in retrospect our older drama) has to say to us today, that we have set up Currency Playtexts – to enable a wider audience to discover them both through the bookshelf and the theatre’. Over 50 years on Currency remains committed to this same principle: to show Australia to itself, to record and to broadcast the voices and the stories of our time.

To read more about our history, please click here.

Our Board
 

Chris Puplick (Chair)
Harriet Parsons (Secretary)
Nick Parsons
Martin Portus
Mark Williams