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Christos Tsiolkas Christos Tsiolkas i(A15508 works by)
Born: Established: 1965 Melbourne, Victoria, ;
Gender: Male
Heritage: Greek
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BiographyHistory

Christos Tsiolkas, the son of Greek migrants, lived in a working class, predominantly Greek, Melbourne inner city suburb and attended state schools including Blackburn High School. He completed an Arts degree at the University of Melbourne in 1987 and has worked as a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. 

Christos has been shortlisted for several awards including the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and won many awards including the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal and the Melbourne Best Writing Award. His novel Loaded was adapted into a film, and The Slap and Barracuda have been adapted for television. 

His interest in film is evidenced in his writing the first monograph in Currency Press's Australian Film Classics series on Schepisi's film, The Devil's Playground, and his writing and directing of short films. He has also collaborated with photographer Zoe Ali on a series of exhibitions dealing with refuge and exile: Destination Unknown 1, 2 & 3, and on a Blake Prize 2011 shortlisted work 'A New Jerusalem: Faith and the City', combining Ali's photographs of places of worship in Melbourne with texts from the Bible, Koran and Torah with his own writing on contemporary life and faith.

Exhibitions

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Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

Watershed : The Death of Dr Duncan 2022 single work musical theatre opera

'Fusing inquest transcripts, press clippings, private correspondence, real and imagined monologues spanning five decades of anti-gay violence, and 30 years of research by local historian Tim Reeves, this joint commission between Adelaide Festival, Feast Festival and State Opera South Australia demands the embrace of all thinking audiences, but is of special importance to this city.'

Source: State Opera South Australia.

2024 winner AWGIE Awards Music Theatre
y separately published work icon Seven and a Half 7 1/2 Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2021 22585817 2021 single work novel

'An audacious and transformative novel about the past, the present and the power of writing and imagination from the award-winning author of Damascus and The Slap.

'Art is not only about rage and justice and politics. It is also about pleasure and joy; it is also about beauty
In a time of rage and confusion, I wanted to write about beauty.
-Christos Tsiolkas

'A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, and he becomes lost in memory and beauty …

'He also begins to tell us a story …

'A retired porn star is made an offer he can't refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires. Can he resist the oblivion and bliss they promise?

'A breathtakingly audacious novel by the acclaimed author of The Slap and Damascus about finding joy and beauty in a raging and punitive world, about the refractions of memory and time and, most subversive of all, about the mystery of art and its creation.' (Publication summary) 

2022 longlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
2022 longlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year
Loaded 2020 single work drama

'The 1995 debut novel from Christos Tsiolkas (The Slap, Dead EuropeBarracuda) makes its mainstage premiere 25 years after the fact.

'Ari (Roy Joseph, Five Bedrooms) is 19, unemployed and aimless. He doesn’t want to be gay. He doesn’t want to be Greek. He doesn’t want to be anything. He finds an escape, of sorts, via sex, drugs and dance clubs. But, he doesn’t really fit in with the queens at The Peel any better than with family in his theía’s backyard.

'This is the story that established Tsiolkas as a provocative master of the written word. Adapted for film in the 1998 underground hit Head On, and now, in close collaboration with playwright Dan Giovannoni, Tsiolkas rewrites Ari’s odyssey for the stage with a 21st century perspective.'

Source: Matlhouse Theatre.

2024 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Drama
2021 winner Victorian Green Room Awards Writing/Adaptation for the Australian Stage
Last amended 11 Nov 2021 09:44:26
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