S Shakthidharan has won a major international prize for drama, which awards $250,000 so a writer can focus on their work without financial pressures. ( Supplied: Belvoir )
Sri Lankan Australian playwright S Shakthidharan, widely known as Shakthi, has won the $US175,000 ($250,000) Windham-Campbell Prize for drama.
The international prize is awarded each year to writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama for their body of work. Writers are nominated secretly and cannot apply.
Shakthi won the award for his ambitious, multigenerational plays exploring Sri Lankan Tamil migrant experiences, including his debut Counting and Cracking . The play, co-written with Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack, also won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature in 2020.
Counting and Cracking spans nearly five decades and runs at three-and-a-half hours. ( Supplied: Belvoir/Brett Boardman )
Shakthi told ABC Arts he "felt proud our stories can be on that global stage".
He found out he won via email a few weeks ago while shooting his debut movie The Laugh of Lakshmi, about a mother and son separated by civil war, in Sri Lanka.
"To get that global recognition hopefully puts forward a version of Australia which is a bit more progressive than our current reality here."
Shakthi added the money also makes it possible for him to continue to pursue a career as a writer.
"I still have to fight hard to do anything in this country," he said.
"It's so incredible to be able to write from a place of focusing on the art."
Rajan Velu, Kalieaswari Srinivasan and Anandavalli in Shakthi's second play, The Jungle and the Sea, at Belvoir in 2022. ( Supplied: Belvoir/Sriram Jeyaraman )
Writing on Instagram , Shakthi said he was "still in shock" about his win.
"The prize is for an artist's body of work, he wrote. The judges decide the winners by reading their work. This means a group of strangers overseas — who had never heard of me — were taken in by these stories of Asia and Australia and chose to embrace them.
Inspired by Shakthi's family history, Counting and Cracking went on to tour the UK and New York.
His family was forced to leave Sri Lanka following the 1983 Black July pogrom in Colombo, which killed an estimated 5,600 Tamils.
Speaking to ABC Arts in 2024 , when the play opened in Melbourne, Shakthi said making Counting and Cracking helped him and his mother come to terms with their migrant identities.
"To tell the gloriously complex story of your community in full public view, and to have other people embrace that, has been a radical act of belonging."
In 2022, Shakthi reunited with Flack for The Jungle and the Sea , which explicitly uncovered the toll of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009).
Shakthidharan’s acclaimed debut play broke silences in his home and in his community and his latest contends with more recent, painful history.
His latest play, The Wrong Gods, about the tension between progress and tradition, and ensuing environmental degradation, opened in Sydney in 2025.
Last year, Shakthi also published his debut memoir, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath.
The Windham-Campbell judges described Shakthi as a "rare storyteller whose work traverses time and space while remaining anchored in core emotional truths".
Shakthi is also director and co-founder of Western Sydney theatre company Kurinji. ( ABC Arts: Anna Kucera )
"Defying local expectations, Shakthidharan brings his whole self — both the Eastern and Western aspects — to his work, opening space for a richer definition of what 'Australian theatre' can be."
Other winners of the Windham-Campbell Prizes this year include British novelist Gwendoline Riley and Belgian American writer Lucy Sante.
Past Australian winners of the prize include author Helen Garner, playwright Patricia Cornelius and poet Ali Cobby Eckermann.
The Jungle and the Sea is at Belvoir St Theatre from July 11-Aug 2, and Melbourne Theatre Company from August 14-September 12.
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