The Griffin Award continues to go from strength to strength. Our annual playwriting award has continued to connect the playwriting community and broaden its reach following a reimagined ceremony at the National Art School in 2024 and a partnership with the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2025 (not to mention the adjoining Keynote address).
One of Griffin’s staple creative programs, the 2026 Griffin Award went to Vernon Pua for 8 Hot Tips On Sharing Your Bed—selected as one of three finalists from hundreds of entries nationwide.
Thanks to the generosity of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, the Griffin Award will once again offer a full commission to the winning playwright, along with in-house dramaturgical support. The Award is a cornerstone of the Griffin calendar year, with an enduring history of recognising new talent, elevating new voices and establishing the careers of Australian writers.
If you have any questions, please email Griffin’s Literary team at [email protected].
It is with utmost excitement that we announce the three finalists and their plays for the 2026 Griffin Award. Congratulations to these talented creatives—their plays were identified as innovative and exciting examples of new Australian playwriting.
They Came for Cane by Amarantha
Amarantha is a Jamaican playwright, producer, performer and arts ecology consultant. Her writing channels the sacred storytelling traditions of her Indigenous American bloodline, West African ancestry and Jamaican culture, alchemised through a contemporary Caribbean diasporic lens. Blending mythology, ritual, humour and Afro-futurism, she creates rich worlds that interrogate how ancestral acumen and mysticism challenge systems of power, science and empire. Her plays are grounded in embodiment, rhythm and cultural memory, wrapping audiences into immersive experiences that are intimate, visceral and expansive. Through her work, she lights pathways for reconnection to the magic of lineage and imagination. She has been selected for La Mama Theatre’s Pathways Writers Program, Malthouse Theatre’s Besen Writers Program (2023), and Melbourne Theatre Company’s Cybec Electric program (2025). She mentors emerging writers through programs at Arts Centre Melbourne and La Mama Theatre. She is a 2026 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Her works include the one-woman show Oshun (La Mama 2022 & 2024; Victoria regional tour 2026), Ilarun: The Cutting Comb (fortyfivedownstairs 2024), River Mumma and the Golden Table (MTC Cybec Electric 2025), and They Came for Cane.
About They Came For Cane
A mystical drama, They Came for Cane follows renowned Australian doctor Cane, as he returns to Jamaica on the eve of a hurricane, to care for his estranged mother Punchi, a gravely ill herbalist. Cane discovers that the ashè (life force) in Punchi’s blood holds the cure for the condition he’s researching. But reconnection to land and community, spurs awakening of the Orisha (god) of herbs and healing – Ossain in Cane, just as he’s drawn into a billion-dollar pharmaceutical extraction deal for his family’s plasma. As a metamorphosis into Ossian erupts, Cane must choose between disowned ancestral power and yearned-for profit.
Bureaucracy: A Love Story by Danish Sheikh
Danish Sheikh is an Indian-born playwright, theatre-maker, and legal scholar based in Melbourne whose work explores the intersection of law, queerness, and the migrant experience. His play Love and Reparation was longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize and developed through Melbourne Theatre Company’s Cybec Electric program and the Darebin Arts Speakeasy Development Program. His lecture-performance Much to Do with Law, But More to Do with Love won the Midsumma Queer Playwriting Award and was presented at Gasworks Arts Park as part of Midsumma Festival 2026. He was a participant in the 2025 Malthouse Theatre Artist Development Program. As a Senior Lecturer at Monash Law School, his research asks how queer communities creatively reshape law through resistance and repair. His work has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in its landmark decision to decriminalise homosexuality. His forthcoming monograph Lawful Repair: Reimagining Law through Queer Dissent will be published by Duke University Press.
About Bureaucracy: A Love Story
Dhruv is a bureaucrat in the business of assessing love. Armaan is a romantic in the business of assessing bureaucracy. They meet. They fall in love. And suddenly Dhruv finds himself having to navigate the very system he once guarded, now as an applicant. Bureaucracy: A Love Story is a rom-com about what happens when love collides with the architecture of the state.
**WINNER** 8 Hot Tips on Sharing Your Bed by Vernon Pua
Vernon Sik Chuan Pua is a novelist and playwright originally from Malaysia. After graduating from high school in Singapore, he pursued his tertiary education at the University of Sydney. He was a finalist for the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award (The River of Grace) and the Griffin Award (Burung Kakak Tua/The Cockatoo). His fiction appears in Overland, Washington Square Review, Willow Springs, J Journal, Gargoyle and Puerto del Sol.
About 8 Hot Tips on Sharing Your Bed
As Sydney gears up for the Olympics, two international students, Sunny and Meng begin the year living in a cramped share-house room, sharing a single bed on alternating 12-hour shifts – no overlap, no questions, no intimacy. What begins as a practical arrangement slowly deepens into something harder to contain. As financial pressure mounts and personal truths surface, friendship blurs into desire, daring them to cross a line. 8 Hot Tips on Sharing Your Bed is a tender, unsentimental two-hander about what it costs to survive, and the quiet choices that shape who we become.
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FUCK•A•PAPA by Zack Lewin
