CANBERRA playwright Dylan Van Den Berg has won the $25,000 drama award at the 37th Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for his play “Milk”, it was announced this evening (February 3) by Victorian Minister for Creative Industries, Danny Pearson, in a ceremony in Melbourne.

Van Den Berg is hot property in the theatre world.

Even before “Milk” was presented at The Street Theatre in June, it won the $30,000 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting  at the 2021 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and he was also presented with the Helen Tsongas Award for excellence in acting at the ACT Arts Awards in November.

A Palawa writer/performer with family connections to the Bass Strait Islands and north-east Tasmania, he is an ANU graduate. Van Den Berg is now a full-time theatre artist who until recently worked as inclusion and diversity adviser at Starlight Children’s Foundation Australia.

Very much a product of The Street Theatre, he came to public attention there in 2019 as Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, and has had his plays developed under the theatre’s dramaturgical programs, The Hive and First Seen.

Van Den Berg has said he wrote the play for his baby daughter, Charlotte, to whom he said: “I wrote this play for you and you’ll know where we come from”.

At the awards, a total of $267,000 in prize money was awarded to eight winning writers in fiction, non-fiction, indigenous writing, drama, poetry, and writing for young adults, all of whom were considered for Australia’s richest literary prize, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, which was won by Veronica Gorrie for “Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resilience”. It also took out the prize for indigenous writing.