Jules Orcullo wins 2024 Griffin Award
August 6, 2024
Jules Orcullo has been awarded the 2024 Griffin Award for outstanding new Australian playwriting for her play, My Dad Never Saw The Beatles.
A musical, mythic retelling of an untrue event set in the Philippines in 1966, My Dad Never Saw The Beatles is about a daughter desperate to fulfil her Dad’s dreams—because in this very real timeline, he sacrificed everything to help fulfil hers.
Orcullo was awarded a full play commission worth $17,400 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund at the Griffin Award Keynote event on Sunday 28 July at the National Art School. In addition to the commission, the prize includes support from Griffin for the playwright to develop their work in-house.
Orcullo was presented the Award by Copyright Agency CEO, Josephine Johnston.
176 entries were assessed anonymously by a panel of industry peers and shortlisted to three finalists, including Christopher Bryant for Parallel Play and Michele Lee for Shoulder. Highly Commended entries were Daley Rangi for The Mountain Remembers and Erica Brennan for Jurassic Bark.
Jules Orcullo says, “Winning the Griffin Award means a whole lot. It means a validation of my writing practice and I’m really excited to hang out with the Griffin team to build this play. I am proud and pleased that I get to tell a story for my family—and the cycles of generosity, gratitude and grief that live inside families like ours.”
Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund supports Australian writers and visual artists and creative organisations to ensure Australian writers and visual artists are better supported and paid appropriately. The Cultural Fund has supported Griffin Theatre Company since 2007 and been a major supporter of the Griffin Award for the last 16 years.
Declan Greene, Artistic Director of Griffin Theatre Company, says, “This was a wildly strong field of finalists. The panel and I could have awarded any of these playwrights in a heartbeat. But My Dad Never Saw The Beatles stood out to us, partially because it’s unlike anything we’d ever read (or heard!) before; an ambitious, wildly imaginative fusion of playwriting, music theatre, personal storytelling… Myself and the team at Griffin cannot wait to get stuck into developing My Dad Never Saw The Beatles with Jules, and we’re grateful to Copyright Agency for bringing us all together around this phenomenal new piece of Australian-playwriting-in-progress.”
Orcullo is the 27th recipient of the Griffin Award and joins a distinguished list of winners including Angus Cerini, Suzie Miller, Brendon Cowell, Debra Oswald, Megan Wilding, Grace Chow, and last year’s winner Wendy Mocke.
Orcullo currently works as Dramaturg at Sydney Theatre Company where she co-facilitates the Watershed Writers program. She also works as Dramaturg for ILBIJERRI Theatre Company’s BlackWrights program. Her debut musical Forgetting Tim Minchin premiered in Belvoir’s 25A Season in 2023 and has been nominated for Best Musical in the Time Out Sydney Arts & Culture Awards 2024. She is a proud founding member of Kallective, developing theatrical works for the Filipinx diaspora.
Photographer: Alice Boshell