Changes on the AWG national executive

22 May, 2015

Former Australian Writers Guild president Tim Pye and South Australian representative Andrew Bovell have stepped down from the AWG National Executive Committee (NEC), with Alana Valentine appointed as the NSW representative.  

Tim Pye, who will continue to chair the AWG Authorship Collecting Society, has been a member of the NEC for most years since 1998. He was president from 2006-2010 and has been Chair of AWGACS since 2011.  Andrew Bovell has been a member of the NEC since 2010.

AWG President Jan Sardi says Tim was a great mentor and inspiration for what a president should be, a great leader because of his passion and sense of justice and injustice.

“[When I took over as president] I would often call Tim for his advice and his wisdom on how to handle some of the trickiest situations,” Jan says. “I felt privileged and humbled to follow in his footsteps as the Guild was left in such a strong position.

“He would put the Guild ahead of his own career and put the interest of writers ahead of his own. He believed in the greater good of all writers, not just the one.”

Tim has won numerous awards for his television work, including AWG and Australian Film Institute awards. His produced projects have also been awarded multiple Logie, AFI, Screen Composer and Directors Guild awards.

His many credits include: Love Child, House Husbands, Old School, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, The Straits, Emerald Falls, All Saints, The Strip, White Collar Blue, Scorched, Stupid, Stupid Man, My Place, Lockie Leonard, SeaChange, Wildside, Changi, Grass Roots, Water Rats, E Street and A Country Practice.

AWG Vice President Mac Gudgeon said Tim always had a thoughtful, strategic, positive and pragmatic view of how the AWG should serve its members industrially and culturally, and an almost prescient view of where it should be headed in the future.

“His broad experience as a frontline writer in the television business has been invaluable in setting policy, negotiating SASA/MATA agreements, reviewing how they work, finding compromises and thinking of ways they can be improved,” Mac said.

Andrew became chair of the South Australian Committee and the state representative on the NEC in 2009.

Jan Sardi says that during that period, his contribution to state and national performance writing community was seminal, fundamental and enduring.

“He cemented the dynamic presence of the AWG in SA following the closure of the state branch in 2012 and he curated the inaugural Day of the Playwright, an informative, provocative, challenging and inspirational initiative designed to assist emerging playwrights who aren't based in Sydney and Melbourne, explore the craft of writing for performance through a series of intensive workshops and forums.”

In 2012, Andrew delivered the 2012 FOXTEL Screenwriters Address and steered the development of 'The National Voice' - the Guild's first quantitative analysis of new works commissioned, developed and produced by the Australian theatre sector.

“Andrew is a dedicated advocate for the importance of growing the national canon of culturally significant scripts, and the supporting writers with the professional conditions needed not only to write them, but also to collaborate with their peers to ensure the performance of them is true to their joint vision.”

Andrew Bovell is one of Australia’s leading performance writers who won numerous awards for theatre, film and television. His AWGIE award-winning play Speaking in Tongues has been seen throughout Australia as well as in Europe and the US and he adapted it for the screen as Lantana. His dramatisation of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River premiered at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2013, and After Dinner, a much earlier work, was staged this year at Wharf 1 in Sydney. His film, A Most Wanted Man, based on the John le Carré novel premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Other films include Edge of Darkness (2010), Blessed (2009), Book of Revelation (2006), Head On (1998), The Fisherman’s Wake (1996) and Strictly Ballroom (1992).

Jan Sardi then welcomed writer and broadcaster Alana Valentine to the NEC. Alana’s play Head Full of Love will tour nationally this year and Barefoot Divas played the Hong Kong Arts Festival. In 2014 Alana was dramaturge on Bangarra’s Patyegarang, won an AWGIE Award for Community/Youth Theatre writing for Comin’ Home Soon and won the BBC International Radio Writing Competition. In 2013, she won three AWGIE Awards, including the Major AWGIE, the inaugural David Wiliamson Prize and the Youth and Community Theatre AWGIE for Grounded. Her plays Parramatta Girls and Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah are both on the NSW Schools Syllabus.