Currency Press

23/12/2025

The out-of-office automated responses are on! The Christmas orders have been shipped! The Currency Press team will be officially signing off from today until 5 January. Thank you all for supporting Australian playwrights in 2025, and for making this year such a lively one.

See you in the new year!

18/12/2025

Huge congratulations to Currency Press authors Nathan Maynard and Yve Blake, who were both recently named as 2025 Sidney Myer Creative Fellows!

First awarded in 2011, the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships provide unrestricted, $200,000 tax-free grants over two years to early mid-career Australian artists, creatives and cultural leaders. Read more below:

Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships provide $200,000 tax free over two years to individual Australian artists, creatives and cultural leaders.

17/12/2025

📢 Big news! We’re thrilled that FLY GIRL by Genevieve Hegney and Catherine Moore has been shortlisted for the Drama prize at the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, presented by The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.

Here’s what the judges had to say:
“Hilarious, interesting and clever, this entertaining play… tells a unique and tautly written story of our recent past, allowing audiences to reflect on how far we’ve come.”

FLY GIRL was made possible by the Commissioners' Circle and the script was published in partnership with Currency Press.

Winners will be announced in February 2026.

15/12/2025

For a limited time only, 30 of our books are discounted by a massive 30% at currency.com.au 💝

Check out the list below, a handpicked selection of 30 titles spanning plays, performing arts criticism, biographies, plays for younger audiences, Indigenous stories, and more!

Get your Christmas orders in by December 17 to ensure they arrive in time — otherwise, our discount runs until New Year's Day:

⋆ Darwin's Reptilia by Charlie Falkner
⋆ Packer & Sons by Tommy Murphy
⋆ The Sugar House by Alana Valentine
⋆ A Very Jewish Christmas Carol by Elise Esther Hearst and Philip Kavanagh
⋆ Archimedes War by Melissa Reeves
⋆ Antigone & Cyrano de Bergerac adapted by Damien Ryan
⋆ Good with Maps & Teacup in a Storm by Noelle Janaczewska
⋆ The Lewis Trilogy by Louis Nowra
⋆ Stories of Love and Deception by Joanna Murray-Smith
⋆ David Williamson: Collected Plays Vol V
⋆ Walking Into the Bigness by Richard Frankland
⋆ Winyanboga Yurringa by Andrea James
⋆ Jandamarra by Steve Hawke
⋆ Daisy Moon was Born This Way by Emily Sheehan
⋆ Pete the Sheep adapted by Eva di Cesare et al.
⋆ The Unusual Suspects: 104 Films that Made World Cinema by Antony Ginnane
⋆ There's a Fax From Bruce by Bruce Beresford and Sue Milliken
⋆ The Back of Beyond by Sylvia Lawson
⋆ Wondrous Strange by Chris Mead
⋆ Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century by John McCallum
⋆ Not Wrong, Just Different by Katharine Brisbane
⋆ How I Learnt to Act by Francis Greenslade
⋆ Stand Up for Literature by John O'Toole and Julie Dunn
⋆ Angela's Kitchen by Paul Capsis et al.
⋆ Broken by Mary Ann Butler
⋆ Navigating by Katherine Thomson
⋆ In Search of Owen Roe by Vanessa O'Neill
⋆ Maggie Stone by Caleb Lewis
⋆ Lake Disappointment by Lachlan Philpott and Luke Mullins

15/12/2025

Our friends at The State Library of New South Wales are now accepting applications for the Early Career Writer Award ($10,000), part of the 2026 Mona Brand Award for Women Stage and Screen Writers 🙌

The Early Career Writer Award ($10,000) is presented to a woman or non-binary writer who is in the early stages of their career and has had their debut work first professionally produced, screened or broadcast between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2025.
Entries close Wednesday 4 February 2026 AEDT.

Learn more here: https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/awards/early-career-writer-award

Image: Sarah Carroll and Melanie Tait in conversation at the Currency Press Festival of Playwrights, 2023. Credit: Dorcas Tang

11/12/2025

03/12/2025

Excited to be publishing Australian Theatre for Young People (atyp) again in 2026 🥰

Registrations for the 2026 Intersection Festival: Orbit are now open, and this time we’re going national!

The Intersection Festival offers skills development across performance, writing, and learning – giving students and teachers the chance to work with ATYP to present brand-new Australian stories on stage, written by emerging playwrights from our National Studio writing residency in 2025.

For the first time, ATYP is thrilled to expand this opportunity beyond NSW to also include schools in Western Australia and South Australia, with the support of our partners WA Youth Theatre Company and Carclew. August 2026 will have three showcase nights in NSW, as well as one in Perth and one in Adelaide.

Visit our website to learn more about the program, key dates and how schools can get involved: https://www.atyp.com.au/program/intersection-festival

Kind thanks to Currency Press, Belmont City College, The Parks Theatre and the generous sponsors who make this festival possible.

Registrations close 13 March 2026.

27/11/2025

Hey teachers! Did you know that Alex Buzo's Norm and Ahmed is now published with AWGIE-winner Nick Parsons' Radha and Ryan in the 2-play collection Straight White Male? Where Norm and Ahmed looks at race relations in 1960s Australia, Radha and Ryan explores themes of gender and masculinity in the 2020s.

Two Plays. One Story.

The perfect opportunity to discuss Buzo's classic text alongside a 21st century reimagining.

Get your copy today: https://www.currency.com.au/books/adaptations/straight-white-male-two-plays/

25/11/2025

🚨REMINDER🚨

Our submissions window for unsolicited plays will close in just 2 weeks — we'll be closing submissions on DECEMBER 10, so hop to it! More info here: https://www.currency.com.au/submissions/

23/11/2025

Coming soon with Australian Theatre for Young People (atyp)!

Would you risk breaking bail for a packet of Mi Goreng? Would you snitch on a mate to save your own skin? Around here, ordinary days can turn on you so fast you’ve still got a smile on your face as your hopes die in your hands.

Yani wants to go to the Easter Show, Kai wants a sense of home, Shanika wants her Mum back, and Lach … well, he just wants his bowl of noodles. But when the justice system is all that stands between these young people and what they want, it raises an important question—how do young people grow when the system keeps cutting them down?

Yuwaalaraay playwright Hannah Belanszky has written a collection of hilarious and heartbreaking stories born from workshops with young people experiencing the youth justice system. Saplings gives an honest, raw look into the adult consequences faced by some of our most vulnerable. This poetic, personal, and unexpected work will leave you asking who’s really to blame, while celebrating the survival instincts of young people.

WINNER OF THE 2024 SYDNEY THEATRE AWARD FOR BEST PRODUCTION FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Available for pre-order now: https://www.currency.com.au/books/drama/saplings/

21/11/2025

LONG WAY HOME. Three plays from Tasnim Hossain, Vidya Rajan and Jordan Shea, featuring an introduction by Suzy Wrong. Coming very soon🔥

When you're part of a global 'diaspora'... where is home, exactly? What does it mean to always live in the space between departure and arrival? Tracing the lineages of disparate families resettled on these lands known as Australia, the plays in this collection seek to offer an answer. The long way home need not always be lonely.

In Tasnim Hossain’s The Village, boy meets girl, grandmother meets grandmother. Over flowerbeds, kitchen tables and shared melodies, medicine student Jay and street busker Taylah discover that a love story doesn’t always need to be romantic.

Looking for Alibrandi, adapted by Vidya Rajan from the novel by Melina Marchetta, returns to the Italian migrant community of twentieth-century Australia. Three generations of Alibrandi women are bound by a family curse. It’s all fallen on seventeen-year-old Josie Alibrandi—already cursed by strict school nuns, racist peers and looming Year 12 exams—to break it.

In Jordan Shea’s Malacañang Made Us, two Filipino families remain entwined by the forces of history. As another Marcos rises to power 36 years after his father’s brutal legacy of martial law, young activist Leo confronts family secrets long buried by his father and his uncle: two boys who had stormed Malacañang Palace on the eve Ferdinand Marcos’ regime fell. Winner of the 2024 Queensland Premier’s Drama Award.

‘[These playwrights] take the fragments of displacement and make from them a new kind of wholeness, one that honours where they come from while daring to dream beyond it.’— Suzy Wrong

Out 25 November, available for pre-order now: https://www.currency.com.au/books/award-winning/long-way-home/