NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2010

Daniel Keene has written for the theatre since 1979.  He has won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama twice, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Drama twice, the South Australian Literary Award for Drama, the Wal Cherry Play of the Year Award and the Sumner Locke Elliot Prize (New York). He has also been awarded, with Ariette Taylor, the Kenneth Myer Medallion for the Performing Arts for his work with the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project.  His work has been presented at the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide International Arts Festivals. Since 2000 over 75 productions of his work have been presented in Europe, predominately in France (including at the Avignon Festival, the Theatre de la Commune in Paris, the National Theatre of Toulouse and at The Theatre de la Ville in Paris).  Seven volumes of his work (French translations by Severine Magois) have been published by éditions Theatrales, Paris. Over the past three years more than a dozen of his plays have been performed and toured in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Portugal.

The Serpent's Teeth, commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company, opened at The Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera house, in April 2008.Daniel has recently completed Dreamers, for Compagnie Tabula Rasa in Toulouse as well as two short plays to be performed in French High Schools for Compagnie La Federation, Lyon. He is also currently under commission from both the Melbourne Theatre Company and The Sydney Theatre Company.

The Serpent's Teeth is a double-bill of two compelling and moving one-act plays by Daniel Keene. The two plays Citizens and Soldiers delicately reveal the real tragedy of war and its impact on ordinary, yet precious, lives.

Citizens, is set at the dividing wall of an unnamed country. Conflict is an unseen force which disrupts the daily routines of the citizens - eroding their choices and shifting the possibilities of their days. Over the course of the play the nobility and generosity of the human spirit, even at its most vulnerable, is carefully probed and laid bare.

In Soldiers, commissioned by Sydney Theatre Company as a companion piece to Citizens, Keene casts a forensic and compassionate eye at five ordinary Australian families. Thrown randomly together for one day, they face together the real cost of war. For some families, the bonds of kinship are strengthened; but others find they are torn apart. Soldiers is a requiem for our time.

The Serpent's Teeth, commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company, opened at The Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera house, in April 2008, and is published by Currency Press

• Read a review of Serpent's Teeth in The Sydney Morning Herald
• Watch a video interview with Daniel