Portrait of the Artist as a Young Grant Snaffler

David Finnigan, who wrote the daintily-titled play Kill Climate Deniers, is adding more lustre to the arts scene with his self-styled “romantic comedy”, titled 44 Sex Acts in One Week. It involves “endurance stunt f***ing”.

His inspirational play made the short list of five for the national best-new-play award by Griffin Theatre in Sydney last month. In 2017 his Killing Climate Deniers won what he calls Griffin’s “incredibly generous” $10,000 first prize.[1] The prize is actually financed from royalties diverted from authors by the gigantic-salaried execs of the Copyright Agency.[2] Alas Finnigan missed out on the big one this year. The first prize was (surprise!) won by a First Nations descendant (Tasmania) for a play involving what the judges called his “huge originality”. It has four Aboriginal women “telling a big exhausting, heart-rending story, which details their resilience in the face of colonisation.”

So Finnigan only bagged a $1000 consolation…