COUNTING AND CRACKING WINS AUSTRALIA’S RICHEST LITERARY AWARD

Shakthidharan’s Counting and Cracking, an epic play encompassing four generations of a Sri Lankan family, has received Australia’s richest literary award, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, at this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Shared with associate writer Eamon Flack, who also directed the acclaimed production for Belvoir and Co-Curious, the pair also took home the $25,000 Prize for Drama. It marks only the second time a play has received both awards after Leah Purcell’s double win in 2017 for The Drover’s Wife.

S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack. Photograph © Ken Leanfore

“Counting and Cracking is a play of great scope and sweep – taking place as it does over several international locations and time periods, folding in a nation’s rawest wounds and crises – that also manages to speak intimately of the ties that bind people within and between cultures. Highly ambitious and wonderfully assured, it is a post-colonial work of sublime generosity and humour; a sober reflection of the painful path our peoples have taken to reach our shores, and a grand and moving celebration of cultural diversity and human spirit.”

The prizes are the latest in a long list of accolades for Counting and Cracking, which won seven Helpmann Awards in 2019 and received Best Mainstage Production, Best New Australian Work and Best Original Score at the Sydney Theatre Awards this month. Premiering as part of Sydney Festival last year, Counting and Cracking played to sell-out audiences at Sydney Town Hall, followed by a season for the Adelaide Festival.

Other works shortlisted in the Prize for Drama category this year were Meyne Wyatt’s City of Gold and Samah Sabawi’s Them. Big winners included Christos Tsiolkas for Damascus, which was awarded the Prize for Fiction, and Christina Thompson for Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, which took home the Prize for Non-Fiction.