Queensland playwright and radio/television script-writer. He worked professionally as a draftsman for Brisbane City Council throughout his playwriting career.
Born and raised in the Sandgate area of Brisbane, Dann was educated at Brisbane Grammar School, and began training as a draftsman at the age of sixteen. He began writing not long afterwards, noting in an early interview that he had written his first play, a one-act comedy, when he was eighteen ('New Playwright').
George Landen Dann began writing with plays for the local amateur dramatics society. One of these works, Beauty It Is Kept Secret, won the Brisbane Repertory Society's Prize in 1931, which brought the then twenty-six-year-old Dann some measure of attention and some notoriety, as a small flurry of complaints arose around the play's depiction of a love affair between a white Australian girl and a fisherman described by the play as 'half-caste' ('Why Prize Play Was Cut'). He returned to the question of Aboriginal-white relations in Fountains Beyond (1942) and Rainbows Die at Sunset (1975).
Dann's work won a number of prizes during this career, both at repertory level and beyond: his radio plays were well represented in ABC radio competitions during the 1940s, and Fountains Beyond even won a Welsh eisteddfod, when performed by a Cardiff-based repertory company. Although he was never as prolific a writer as some of his contemporaries, his success has led him to be called Queensland's first significant playwright.
For further reading, see the Wikipedia entry compiled by University of Queensland students from primary sources in 2012.
Sources:
'New Playwright', Telegraph, 16 May 1931, p.9.
'Why Prize Play Was Cut', Telegraph, 14 July 1931, p.1.
