The Australian Writers’ Foundation is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2009 Kit Denton Fellowship is the groundbreaking theatre company Back to Back Theatre. The $25, 000 fellowship was presented to the Geelong based company by Andrew Denton as part of the 42nd Annual AWGIE Awards.

The fellowship was set up in 2007 in memory of Kit Denton, scriptwriter, author, poet and lyricist, whose most famous work was the international best-selling novel The Breaker.

Reflecting the courage of Kit’s own work, the purpose of the Fellowship is to promote courage in performance writing and to champion bold and challenging ideas.

Back to Back Theatre is one of Australia’s leading contemporary theatre companies and in its 21-year history has forged its own unique relationship to theatre, developing an original, distinctive artistic voice and a working process that supports its ensemble of actors with intellectual disabilities as its creative core. The company’s remarkable production Food Court was recently performed at the Sydney Opera House as part of Brian Eno’s Luminous festival. The Kit Denton Fellowship will allow the company to develop their proposed project Ganesh Vs the Third Reich into a marketable script.

After awarding the fellowship Andrew Denton said:

“In the tradition of the boy who pointed out the Emperor’s new clothes, we were looking for writers with courage, to think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable. I think we can proudly say that in Back to Back Theatre we found it. ”

Zapruder’s other films sponsors the fellowship along with Animal Logic, TressCox Lawyers, FremantleMedia, GNWTV and Kennedy Miller Mitchell.