Andrew Bovell

ANDREW BOVELL won the best screenplay prize at the 2009 San Sebastian Film Festival for his film, “Blessed.” The screenplay also won the Australian Writers’ Guild AWGIE Award and was nominated for an Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award.

One of Australia’s most celebrated writers, with a body of work encompassing film, theatre, television and radio, Bovell’s first feature credit was as co-writer of the original screenplay for Baz Luhrmann’s “Strictly Ballroom” in 1992. Following that, he wrote the 1998 drama “Head On,” which earned an AWGIE Award and an AFI Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the 2006 romantic thriller “The Book of Revelation.” But it was his third film, director Ray Lawrence’s 2001 “Lantana,” which put him into the international spotlight. A box-office hit in Australia, it earned acclaim at film festivals around the world and won seven AFI Awards, including Best Screenplay from an Adapted Source (Bovell’s own play, “Speaking in Tongues”), Best Film and Best Director. It garnered additional accolades for Bovell when named Best Adapted Screenplay by the Film Critics Circle of Australia, Best Screenplay at the Durban Film Festival and Best Screenplay at the 2003 London Film Critics’ Circle Awards.

His play, “When the Rain Stops Falling,” has been performed nationally in Australia and is the winner of an AWGIE for Best Stage Play, as well as the Louis Esson Prize for Drama and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award. A new production of the play opened at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2009, and the American premiere was slated to open at New York’s Lincoln Center in March 2010. His other plays include “Holy Day,” which won the 2002 AWGIE; “Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?,” which won the Gold Australian Writers’ Guild Award in 1999; and the 1997 AWGIE Award winner “Speaking in Tongues,” which went on to be produced in the UK and the USA and throughout Europe.

Warner Bros. Pictures