Ben Brooker

Ben is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, essayist, and bookseller. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from Flinders University and an Advanced Diploma of Professional Writing from Adelaide College of the Arts. His work has been featured by Overland, Australian Book Review, RealTime, ArtsHub, CityMag, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin, Witness Performance, and Daily Review, as well as the international publications Tanzconnexions and ArtsEquator. In 2013 Ben was an Emerging Writer in Residence at the SA Writers’ Centre, and was a featured playwright at the 2014 Emerging Writers’ Festival Adelaide Roadshow and the 2015 National Play Festival. His plays have been performed in Sydney and Adelaide, including by the award-winning Adelaide independent theatre companies five.point.one and SAYarts. In 2016-17 he was an inaugural Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellow and in 2018-19 was writer-in-residence at the Mill. His latest performance projects include commissions by Hopgood Theatre Youth Theatre Project, ActNow Theatre, and OzAsia Festival, and Below the Line, an exploration of online comment culture, which was featured in Adhocracy, Vitalstatistix’s national experimental arts hothouse, in 2017. In 2020, Below the Line will be presented at Melbourne’s Substation as part of Next Wave Festival.