Noelle Janaczewska is a playwright, poet, essayist, and the author of The Book of Thistles (UWA Publishing, 2017). Much of her work deals with history's gaps and silences, focusing on people, plants, creatures and events which have been overlooked or marginalised in official records. Noelle's work has been produced, broadcast and published locally and internationally, and in 2014 she received a prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale for her body of work as a dramatist. In Australia her plays and audio scripts have won a Queensland Premier's Literary Award, the Playbox-Asialink Playwriting Competition, the Griffin Award and nine AWGIE Awards. Noelle also presents performance essays-a term she coined to describe a hybrid which mashes the essay and the monologue with a range of other sources and genres. Blasted Island-Nauru's backstory was part of the Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and in 2015 Noelle presented Dear Scott- her collected letters to the then Minister for Immigration. Recent productions include Seoul City Sue for ABC Radio National and the Children's Audio Tour for the National Museum of Australia and the British Museum's Rome: City and Empire exhibition, both in 2018.
