S. Shakthidharan

The playwright S. Shakthidharan was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Sydney, Australia, where he currently lives. Shakthidharan is a rare storyteller whose work traverses time and space while remaining anchored in core emotional truths. Inspired by his own family history, he made his theatrical debut with Counting and Cracking (Associate Writer, Eamon Flack) (2019)—an epic three-and-a-half-hour family saga spanning nearly five decades, set across a dozen locations, and featuring a plot twist that leaves audiences amazed at the sheer range of Shakthidharan’s talent. His fourth and latest play, The Wrong Gods (2025), about a mother and daughter in a paradisiacal riverside valley in India, cemented his reputation for skillfully distilling large-scale tragedies into intimate terms. In a tribute to the Narmada Bachao Andolan—an Indian social movement primarily led by women launched in the ’80s to protect people from displacement—most of those involved with the play, from the cast to the production team, are women, including the co-director Hannah Goodwin. Defying local expectations, Shakthidharan brings his whole self—both the Eastern and Western aspects—to his work, opening space for a richer definition of what “Australian theater” can be. Shakthidharan is the recipient of the Green Room Award for Outstanding New Australian Writing (2024) and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and Prize for Drama (2020), among other honors.