About

Noëlle Janaczewska is a playwright, poet and essayist. The author of The Book of Thistles (UWA Publishing)—which fuses environmental history, memoir, monologue, archival collage and digressions (shortlisted for the 2018 Mascara Avant-garde Awards)—and the 2020 collection Scratchland (UWA Publishing Poetry Series).

A graduate of Oxford and London Universities with a Doctorate from the University of Technology, Sydney, Noëlle is the recipient of multiple awards, fellowships and residencies, including the 2020 NSW Premier’s Digital History Prize, a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, the Griffin Award, ten AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild Industry Excellence) Awards and a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University for her body of work as a dramatist.

Much of Noëlle’s writing deals with history’s gaps and silences, focusing on people, plants, creatures and events overlooked or marginalised in official records. Her work has been produced, broadcast and published  internationally as well as locally.

Recent productions include: The Past is a Wild Party (Siren Theatre Co, Sydney 2024); Mrs C Private Detective (ABC RN, 2022); The End of Winter (Siren Theatre Co, Sydney 2022, touring 2023 – 2025); Experiment Street (ABC RN, 2019); Yellow Yellow Sometimes Blue (Q Theatre/JSPAC, Sydney, 2018); audio scripts for the National Museum of Australia’s Rome: City and Empire exhibition, and Good With Maps (Siren Theatre Co, multiple seasons 2016 – 2021).

Performance essays are a key part of Noëlle’s practice. A hybrid form she has developed which combines big picture thinking with the intimacy of the theatrical monologue. They cover a range of subjects from North Korea to fictional anthropologists to gravel, and vary in length from fifteen to fifty-plus minutes. Poetic at heart, performative in nature, often funny, sometimes personal. The Hannah First Collection, 1919-1949 was created for the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, and Blasted Island—Nauru’s backstory was part of the Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

Underpinning Noëlle’s work is her belief that writers and artists not only have a responsibility to speak out about injustices, and hold governments to account for the things they do in our name, but also, and importantly, to speak out in imaginative and creatively ambitious ways.

Noëlle is a member of 7-ON Playwrights and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.

She lives with her partner on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney’s inner west.