Description

In Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly, a collection of four plays by one of Australia's most fearless playwrights, Patricia Cornelius displays all her skill, wit, beauty and anger, and serves them up like a still beating heart on a chipped plate.

Cornelius's signature grungy poetic style is at its finest in the early play Love, a brutally beautiful journey into the emotional core of three broken souls in a broken world.

In SLUT, a short, sharp stab into the heart of internalised misogyny, Cornelius explores the life and perceived crimes of Lolita, a schoolgirl whose sexual confidence both frightens and fascinates her peers.

In The Club takes us into the adrenalin-fuelled, macho-pumped world of professional footballers and its intersection with slut-shaming and issues of consent.

And in the sweeping, Lorca-inspired The House of Bernadette, the family of women left behind after the death of a patriarch is a goldmine of female desire, sexual repression, and individual compromise.

'[Her work] channels the power of resisting received literary tradition in order to open up a space where the lives of characters on the margins can become vessels of universal truths.' —Windham-Campbell Award judges.

Biography

Patricia Cornelius

PATRICIA CORNELIUS is a founding member of Melbourne Workers Theatre. Patricia has a fierce commitment to class and her work often examines the lives of the marginalized. She’s a playwright, novelist and film writer. Cornelius is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Mona Brand Award and the 2019 Green Room award for Life Achievement. Her prizes for stage work include the 2011 Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary Awards, the Patrick White Playwright’s Award, the Richard Wherrett Prize, the Wal Cherry Award and numerous AWGIES for stage, community theatre, theatre for young people. She was awarded the Australian Writers Foundation Playwriting Award in 2015 as well as the Patrick White Fellowship (2012), and a Fellowship from the Australia Council’s Theatre Board. Patricia has won the AWGIE Major Award three times. She has written over 35 plays including: TRUTH, My Sister Jill, Bad Boy, Runt, Anthem, In the Club, Shit, Big Heart, Savages, Do not go gentle…, Slut, Love and The Call. Patricia wrote the adaption of SHIT for film and co-wrote the feature film adaptation Blessed, Patricia’s novel, My Sister Jill (Random House) was published in 2002.