Noëlle Janaczewska

Writer

Noëlle Janaczewska is a playwright, poet and essayist. The author of The Book of Thistles (UWA Publishing)—part environmental history, part poetry, part memoir—and the 2020 collection Scratchland (UWA Publishing Poetry Series).

She is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale for her body of work as a dramatist.

In Australia, Noëlle’s plays have won two AWGIE Awards for Community and Youth Theatre (Yellow Yellow Sometimes Blue; Teacup in a Storm), a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award (Mrs Petrov’s Shoe), the Playbox-Asialink Playwriting Competition and the Griffin Award (both for Songket). Her audio works across drama and nonfiction have received the 2020 NSW Premier’s Digital History Prize and eight AWGIE Awards. 

Recent productions include: Mrs C Private Detective (ABC RN, 2022); The End of Winter (Siren Theatre Company, Sydney 2022 – touring in 2023); Experiment Street (ABC RN, 2019); Yellow Yellow Sometimes Blue (Q Theatre/Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Sydney, 2018); audio scripts for the National Museum of Australia and the British Museum’s Rome: City and Empire exhibition, and Good With Maps (Siren Theatre Company, multiple seasons, local and international, 2016 – 2021).

Noëlle also writes performance essays—a term she coined to describe a hybrid which mashes the essay, spoken word and the theatrical monologue with a range of other sources and genres. The Hannah First Collection, 1919-1949 was created for the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, and Blasted Island—Nauru’s backstory was part of the Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

A graduate of Oxford and London Universities, with a doctorate from the University of Technology, Sydney, Noëlle is an adjunct professor at the University of Queensland.

Current writing includes Lessons in Eating for Migrants, Culinary Inauthentic and a suite of queer-themed projects across poetry, prose and performance.

For enquiries regarding Noëlle Janaczewska please contact us via email or on (02) 9319 7199.