Anna Barnes is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and author who created the SBS drama series Safe Home. For her pilot episode, Anna won the Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting at the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Additionally, the project is nominated in the Best Miniseries category at both the 2024 AACTA Awards and TV Week Logie Awards. Recently, Anna wrote on the second season of the popular Foxtel series The Twelve.

No stranger to success, Anna wrote Content, Australia’s first vertical video series for Ludo Studios and ABC TV, which garnered an Australian Writers Guild (AWGIE) Award win for Best Web Series and nominations for several other awards, including an International Emmy for Best Short-Form, a Rose D’Or for Best Social Media and Video Series, and an AACTA for Best Online Drama or Comedy.

In additional credits, Anna served as a contributing writer on the second season of the children’s show The Strange Chores for ABC, and was head writer and co-producer of the ABC comedy series Retrograde. Filmed in isolation, Retrograde follows a group of thirty-something friends during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the theatre space, Anna’s play Lethal Indifference opened at the Sydney Theatre Company in February 2018 and was consequently highly commended by Victoria Premier’s Literary Awards. In 2017, she won an AWGIE for the geolocative story app Ghosts of Bileola.

Anna’s plays and monologues have been performed around Australia. Likewise, she has had work published in Kill Your Darlings, Killings, The Lifted Brow and The Age. Her book, Girl! The Ultimate Guide To Being You (Penguin 2012), was named as one of the 2013 Eva Pownall Notable Books by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

In 2007, she was the winner of the British Council’s Realise Your Dream award, facilitating her to study playwriting at Royal Court Theatre, London, UK. In 2012, she collaborated with comic artist Sara Drake (USA) to tell the story of losing her sense of smell for Radio, with Pictures at the Sydney Opera House. She won Sydney Theatre Company’s Patrick White Playwright’s Award in 2013 for her play, MinusOneSister, ultimately published by Currency Press in 2017.

Currently, Anna has a number of television series and theatre pieces in development, including Bulletproof, a six-part drama series with Ludio Studios that she is writing and co-producing.

For a full CV please contact info@rgm.com.au.