Counting and Cracking: Belvoir Street's standout hit wins Australia’s richest literary prize
S “Shakthi” Shakthidharan and associate writer Eamon Flack have won Australia richest literary prize, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, for their drama Counting and Cracking. The epic play – Shakthidharan’s first – was the standout hit for Belvoir Theatre company in 2019.
The pair will share in the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature on top of their $25,000 category win for drama – the same total awarded to asylum seeker, journalist and author Behrouz Boochani, who was still detained on Manus Island when he swept the awards with his debut book No Friend But the Mountains in 2019.
Counting and Cracking was performed to sell-out audiences at Sydney Town Hall, which was converted to look like a Sri Lankan town hall for Sydney festival. It won seven Helpmann awards, and has been compared to legendary Australian dramas Cloudstreet and The Secret River. It has more than 50 characters, played by 16 actors, and spans four generations.
Related: Counting and Cracking: the story behind Belvoir Street theatre's most ambitious play to date
Shakthidharan, 37, describes himself as an Australian storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry. His own family fled Sri Lanka in 1983, when the civil war broke out – but until he started working on the play, they hadn’t shared their stories.
The play’s journey to stage was a long one, he told the Guardian, and initially his family was resistant.
“I started researching the play 10 years ago. The first part of the journey was listening to lots of Sri Lankans around the world, and their stories of displacement. Initially mum thought the play was a bad idea.”
But after reading a first draft, “she opened up,” he said. “Mum then started to come to [script] developments, and started sharing her stories.”
Shakthidharan’s mother had a middle class life in Sri Lanka, as the granddaughter of one of the country’s only Tamil politicians. So when the civil war erupted, “she didn’t want to leave.
“The decision was heartbreaking for her and she buried her pain. When she read the first draft, that pain opened up again – but the play helped her reconcile with what happened.”
Counting and Cracking captures the complexity of the migrant story, including the enormous feelings of loss that people carry when they leave their homelands.
“No matter how welcoming Australia is, it can be difficult to reconcile leaving a place that is your home,” he continues.
Shakthidharan is now writing a film set in postwar Sri Lanka. “I think I’m pretty much definitely Australian,” he says, “but the play has given me a way of understanding my Sri Lankan heritage in a way I [hadn’t] before. There’s no reason why an Australian story can’t also be a story of Sri Lanka.”
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Award was announced on Thursday night at MPavilion. Five category winners including Christina Thompson for fiction, Charmaine Papertalk Green for poetry and Helena Fox for writing for young adult formed a pool from which the overall winner was selected by the panel of judges. Each won $25,000.
The winner of the 2020 fiction category was Christos Tsiolkas for his novel Damascus, set amongst Jesus’ followers in the early Christian era – and selected as one of Guardian Australia’s “unmissable” books of 2019.
The book has been critically acclaimed, but initially Tsiolkas was unsure of how it would be received.
“A week before it was released was absolute fucking terror,” he told Guardian Australia. “It took five or six years to work on this book and with this, the terror became more acute. Faith and doubt and shame have been weaved through my writing from the get-go; and for me Damascus is also connected to Dead Europe, which also took a long time and was also about faith and doubt.
“Fiction is a selfish pursuit,” he continued. “You are working out obsessions and questions through the writing.”
Tsiolkas’ obsessions haven’t been settled entirely with the writing of Damascus. “I was always a doubter, as a left-winger, with religion – but I am not as scared of [doubt] now. It’s a good position to be in, to always keep questioning. And I loved being in that world [of Damascus]. It was a time of incredible intellectual ferment.”
Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards: full winners list
Overall winner: Counting and Cracking by S. Shakthidharan; associate writer Eamon Flack
Fiction
Winner: Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin)
Shortlist: Act of Grace by Anna Krien; Simpson Returns by Wayne Macauley; The House of Youssef by Yumna Kassab; and The Yield by Tara June Winch
Non-fiction
Winner: Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson
Shortlist: Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea; See What You Made Me Do by Jess Hill, Songspirals by Gay’wu Group of Women; Tell Me Why by Archie Roach; The Girls by Chloe Higgins
Drama:
Winner: Counting and Cracking by S. Shakthidharan; associate writer Eamon Flack (Belvoir and Co-Curious)
Shortlist: City of Gold by Meyne Wyatt (Currency Press, in association with Queensland Theatre and Griffin Theatre); Them by Samah Sabawi (La Mama Theatre, in association with Samah Sabawi and Lara Week)
Poetry:
Winner: Nganajungu Yagu by Charmaine Papertalk Green
Shortlist: Birth Plan by L.K. Holt; Yuiquimbiang by Louise Crisp
Writing for Young Adults:
Winner: How It Feels to Float by Helena Fox
Shortlist: Invisible Boys by Holden Sheppard; This is How We Change the Ending by Vikki Wakefield
Unpublished Manuscript:
Winner: Hovering by Rhett Davis
Shortlist: A Million Things by Emily Spurr; In Real Life by Allee Richards
People’s Choice Award:
Winner: The Girls by Chloe Higgins
