Leah Purcell wins Australia's richest literary prize for reimagining of The Drover's Wife

Award for fiction given posthumously to Georgia Blain, while Randa Abdel-Fattah takes people’s choice award

The Indigenous Australian playwright and actor Leah Purcell has won the Victorian prize for literature for her acclaimed reimagining of Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife, with a $100,000 prize which amounts to Australia’s richest single literary award.

At the Victorian premier’s literary awards on Tuesday, Purcell was also awarded the $25,000 prize for drama for the same play, which premiered as part of the 2016 season for Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, and which the panel of judges described as a piece of theatre that “explodes out of the blocks with a moment of stark brutality and never lets up”.

Related: The Drover's Wife review – plot twist leaves Australian classic spinning on its axis

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