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Suneeta Peres da Costa Suneeta Peres da Costa i(A8634 works by)
Born: Established: 1976 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
Heritage: Indian
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BiographyHistory

Suneeta Peres da Costa received a Bachelor of Arts in Communication, graduating with First Class Honours and the University Medal, from the University of Technology, Sydney (1998). In 2001 she received a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, New York while on a Fulbright Scholarship. She later continued her studies at The University of Sydney by undertaking a PhD.

Peres da Costa's radio plays, Watermark, Angelina's Song, Children See Everything, and Fire and Water have been produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and others of her plays have been shortlisted and have won awards including the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award (1996), the Ian Reed Foundation Prize for Radio Drama (1998) and the Sydney Theatre Company-ICI Young Playwrights' Award. Peres da Costa also received the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts Writers in the Park New Writer's Fellowship in 1998. In 2004 she was granted a scholarship by the Australia Council, for six months in the B.R. Whiting Library in Rome.

Exhibitions

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2024 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships Arts Projects for Individuals and Groups
2021 longlisted Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize
2020 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships 2020 Resilience Fund: Survive     $440 

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Saudade Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2018 13182805 2018 single work novella

'A coming-of-age story set in Angola in the period leading up to the colony’s independence, Saudade focuses on a Goan immigrant family caught between complicity in Portuguese rule, and their dependence on the Angolans who are their servants. The title (saudade means ‘melancholy’ in Portuguese) speaks to the longing for homeland that haunts its characters, and especially the young girl who is the book’s protagonist and narrator. Suneeta Peres da Costa’s novella captures with intense lyricism the difficult relationship between the daughter and her mother, and the ways in which their intimate world opens up questions about domestic violence, the legacies of Portuguese slavery and the end of empire. The young woman’s intellectual awakening unfolds into a growing awareness of the lies of colonialism, and the violent political ruptures that ultimately lead to her father’s death, and their exile.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2020 shortlisted Festival Awards for Literature (SA) Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature South Australian Literary Awards Award for Fiction
2019 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Fiction
form Watermark 1998 single work drama radio play

'A mother asks her daughter, "Do you remember your father being a sad man?" This question releases recollections of childhood, of the loves and tensions in the triangular relationship of child and parents. 'Watermark' explores - through differing prisms of memory - a moment of disintegration in this relationship. The judges of the Ian Reed Competition for young playwrights called this prize-winning work 'compelling and poignant - powerfully suggestive and knife-sharp.' Suneeta Peres da Costa paints a remarkable and compassionate audio picture of a pivotal event in three people's lives.'

Source: ABC website, www.abc.net.au (Sighted: 30/05/2007)

1998 Ian Reed Foundation Prize for Radio Drama Microplay
Last amended 16 Sep 2021 10:45:17
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