In Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly, a collection of four plays by one of Australia's most fearless playwrights, Patricia Cornelius displays all her skill, wit, beauty and anger, and serves them up like a still beating heart on a chipped plate.
Cornelius's signature grungy poetic style is at its finest in the early play Love, a brutally beautiful journey into the emotional core of three broken souls in a broken world.
In SLUT, a short, sharp stab into the heart of internalised misogyny, Cornelius explores the life and perceived crimes of Lolita, a schoolgirl whose sexual confidence both frightens and fascinates her peers.
In The Club takes us into the adrenalin-fuelled, macho-pumped world of professional footballers and its intersection with slut-shaming and issues of consent.
And in the sweeping, Lorca-inspired The House of Bernadette, the family of women left behind after the death of a patriarch is a goldmine of female desire, sexual repression, and individual compromise.
[Her work] channels the power of resisting received literary tradition in order to open up a space where the lives of characters on the margins can become vessels of universal truths. Windham-Campbell Award judges.
Cornelius, Patricia: - PATRICIA CORNELIUS is a playwright, screenwriter and novelist. Cornelius' play Shit was presented at the 2017 Sydney Festival, following its 2015 Melbourne premiere as part of MTC's Neon Season and its 2016 remount at 45Downstairs. Her play Savages won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Drama in 2014 and the Green Room Award for Writing and was nominated for an AWGIE and the Griffin Prize. Over her career Cornelius has written over 25 plays, including:  Big Heart,  Do Not Go Gentle, The Call, Love, Fever, Boy Overboard, Slut and Who's Afraid of the Working Class? (co-written with Andrew Bovell, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Reeves and Irine Vela). Her prizes for stage work include the 2011 Victorian and NSW Premiers' Literary Awards, the Patrick White Playwright's Award, the Richard Wherrett Prize, the Wal Cherry Award and nine AWGIE Awards for stage, community theatre, and theatre for young people. She won the prestigious Australian Writers' Foundation Playwriting Award in 2015 as well as the Patrick White Fellowship (2012), and a Fellowship from the Australia Council's Theatre Board. Cornelius has won the AWGIE Major Award three times. Cornelius is a founding member of Melbourne Workers' Theatre. Cornelius co-wrote the feature film adaptation Blessed, based on the play Who's Afraid of the Working Class? (for which she won an AWGIE Award) and she is developing a feature film with director Catriona McKenzie with Screen Australia funding. Cornelius wrote the novel My Sister Jill (Random House) and many of her plays are published by Currency Press. In February 2018, Corenlius' play In the Club premiered at the State Theatre Company of South Australia, and in May, her The House of Benarda Alba adaptation premiered at the Melbourne Theatre Company.
