The First Play Collection: Market of Lives/ Meat Party/ A Graveyard for the Living

Duong Le Quy was born in 1968. He first arrived in Australia in 1994 and was granted Australian citizenship as a writer/ director/producer under the Special Skilled Class Category – DIMA.

He graduated as a playwright from Hanoi Institute of Theatre and Cinema in 1990 and as a director from the National Institute Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 1998. In the past six years, Duong has made a vital contribution to the development of cultural understanding between Australian and Vietnamese people.

Recent awards include a 1998 NSW Writer’s Fellowship; a 1999 Australia Council Literature Grant; an Asialink Performing Arts Residency and a 2001 Churchill Fellowship in Theatre. Duong won the 2002 Fulbright Scholarship to study filmmaking at the Los Angeles Film School in Hollywood. Duong’s other plays include The Request of Spring, Samurai, A Whisper from the Secret World (Scenario for Dance) and Motherland of the Foreign Son (Opera). Duong is currently working on a new play Boat from the Lost Ocean commissioned by Playbox Theatre. Market of Lives won the Gold Medal at the 1990 Vietnam National Theatre Festival. Meat Party won the 1999 Playbox – Asialink Asian Australian Playwriting Competition and the 2001 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Best Drama (Stage) as well as a nomination for an AWGIE award. A Graveyard for the Living was selected for the Australian Play Collection by the Australian Script Centre.

“[Duong’s plays] ask questions that are universal to all lands that have seen the horrors of war. How do we reconcile ourselves to lands that have been flooded in the blood and the screams of the living and the dead? How does one generation cope with the lies and guilt of another? How do we honour those souls whose passage was unsung and unmarked?” Michael Kantor, Director