Debra Oswald (born 30 August 1959) is an Australian writer for film, television, stage, radio and children's fiction. In 2008 her Stories in the Dark won Best Play in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. She is creator and head writer of the Channel 10 drama series Offspring, for which she won the 2011 NSW Premier's Literary Award.
She began writing as a teenager. Her first play was workshopped at the 1977 Australian National Playwrights Conference when she was 17, and then broadcast on ABC Radio. She studied at the Australian National University and at the Australian Film Television and Radio School and has since made her living as a writer for film, television, stage and radio as well as publishing a number of novels for children. She lives in Sydney with the author and radio personality Richard Glover; they have two sons.
Her best-known play, Dags, has had many productions around Australia and has been published and performed in Britain and the United States. Debra's other plays include Going Under, produced by Adelaide's Troupe Theatre in 1983, and Lumps, which premiered at the Q Theatre in 1993. In 1996, a co-production of Debra's play Gary's House by Playbox and the Q Theatre played in Melbourne, Penrith and the Gold Coast. There have also been productions in Adelaide, Hobart, Newcastle, Canberra and Hjoerring, Denmark. Gary's House is on the New South Wales Year 12 drama syllabus. In 2000, her play Sweet Road was presented in Melbourne and Adelaide in a Playbox/STC of SA co production, and in Sydney by the Ensemble Theatre. Sweet Road, Gary's House and The Peach Season were all short-listed for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.
Mr Bailey's Minder and The Peach Season both premiered at Griffin Theatre Company. Mr Bailey's Minder toured nationally in 2006 and premiered in the United States in 2008 at The Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Gary's House was staged in Japanese in Tokyo by Rakutendan Theatre in 2008.
Her writing for television includes the mini series Palace of Dreams (1985) as well as Dancing Daze (1986), Police Rescue (1991), Bananas in Pyjamas (1992), Wildside (1997), The Secret Life of Us (2001), and Outriders (2001). Her Police Rescue scripts have been nominated for AFI, AWGIE and State Library awards. Her telemovie Offspring was filmed in late 2009, produced by Southern Star/John Edwards and Network Ten; a series based on Offspring was broadcast in 2010. A second series is currently in production.
Debra is also the author of the children's novels Me and Barry Terrific (1987) and The Return of the Baked Bean (1990) and The Fifth Quest (2002). She has also written three Aussie Bites - Nathan and the Ice Rockets (1998), Frank and the Emergency Joke (2000), and "Frank and the Secret Club". The Redback Leftovers (2000) is an entertaining story for upper primary students about the debut season of the worst soccer team ever. It has been republished in 2007. Her two most recent novels for young people are Getting Air (2007), a story about skateboarding, andBlue Noise (2009), a book about teenagers who establish a blues band.
She has written four plays for teenage audiences, the most recent of which is House on Fire, performed by the Australian Theatre for Young People in June 2010. She's written two previous plays for the Australian Theatre for Young People - Skate, which toured to the Belfast Festival, and Stories in the Dark .
Of Stories in the Dark, her winner in the NSW Literary Awards, the judges said: "By engaging us with dark tales, paradoxically told as a distraction in a time of war, Oswald probes the role of imagination in survival, with insight and a sureness of craft.... Debra Oswald's clear-eyed, compassionate play shows us the role of story in making sense, and thus its place in the persistence of hope."
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