Noëlle Janaczewska

Writer

Noëlle Janaczewska is a multi-award winning Sydney-based writer whose plays, radio scripts, libretti, fiction and essays have been performed, broadcast and published throughout Australia and overseas.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, most notably Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize in 2014, which recognised her body of dramatic writing.

Recently shortlisted for the 2025 NSW Premier’s Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting, Noëlle’s latest play The Past is a Wild Party premiered at Qtopia in 2024. The End Of Winter premiered at Griffin Theatre in 2022 and has since toured NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and Singapore. It was also shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2023.

In Australia, her plays have won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award (Mrs Petrov’s Shoe), the Playbox-Asialink Playwriting Competition and the Griffin Award (Songket). Her radio plays have received 8 AWGIE Awards, for the nonfiction feature Seoul City Sue (2018), My Life in Cookbooks (2014) and the drama Random Red (2012). Seoul City Sue was also shortlisted for the 2019 Betty Roland Prize for Screenwriting at the NSW Premier’s Awards. Noelle’s radio play Experiment St was released on Radio National in late 2019 and won the 2020 NSW Premier’s History Award - Digital History Prize. In 2018, she also completed the Rome: City and Empire Kids and Family Audio Tour for the National Museum of Australia.

Her play Yellow Yellow Sometimes Blue premiered at The Joan as part of the Penrith Performing and Visual Arts 2018 season. The Play was the winner of the AWGIE Award for Community and Youth Theatre.

Other works include Good With Maps (produced by the Siren Theatre Company/KXT in 2016, remounted at Belvoir St Theatre in 2017 and enjoyed regional tours in 2018 and 2021), Teacup in a Storm (The Q/Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, 2016), The History of the Single Girl and The Other Polish Explorer (both for ABC Radio National, 2015), Playing Awkward (Currency Press: ‘Cue the Chorus’, 2014), and Third Person (Union House Theatre, Melbourne, 2013).

Noëlle published Scratchland a collection of poetry with the University of Western Australia Publishing in 2020. Her book The Book of Thistles, was published by University of Western Australia Publishing in 2017.

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

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