MARY Anne Butler is basking in the success of just having won the NT Literary Award for best play.

The playwright/performer for “Highway of Lost Hearts”, coming to The Street next week, is the daughter of a Canberra diplomat. She first studied at ANU, where she joined what is now NUTS (National University Theatre Society).

She’s also a graduate in acting from the Victorian College of the Arts, but that’s not what does it for her. In fact she never enjoyed acting until Lee Lewis, director of “Highway”, more or less “tricked” her into reading the play and cast her on the spot.

Her character wakes one morning to find her heart is missing. She feels nothing, so with her trusty dog (whose name is Dog) she decides to go and look for it in the Australian outback.

Sadly, the story was inspired in 2008 when a friend died in a Sydney Harbour boating accident. Butler drove from Darwin, where she had  moved in 2002, to see where the friend had been killed and in the process “found my heart was missing from my chest… my friend’s death was the nail in the proverbial coffin.”

Yet playing the part with Lewis’ clever directing, which intermingles the belly laughs with the sorrow, has given her back “my joy in performing”.

One thing Butler did get out of boring old acting school was a knack for character study that, in part, led her to writing in the early 1990s.

Later her play “Half Way There” toured the NT and Queensland, she won the 2012 Birch, Carroll and Coyle NT Literary Award for screenwriting and the 2010 Darwin Festival Playscript Award for “Dragons”, and “Highway of Lost Hearts” was published this year by Currency Press.

The character that she plays is incredibly naïve, in her view, yet Butler believes she has written a personality quite removed from her own – and that’s the nature of playwriting.

And did she ever find her heart again? Yes, she asserts, “I think you have to actively look for your heart, to get to the point where you’ve got nothing to lose, but some people can’t do that.”

“Highway of Lost Hearts”, The Street Theatre, 7.30pm, August 26-30, bookings to 6247 1223 or thestreet.org.au