Van Badham is a writer, commentator, activist, occasional broadcaster, theatremaker and one of Australia’s most controversial public intellectuals. In addition to a weekly column for Guardian Australia, her work has appeared in The Age, Australian Cosmopolitan, Daily Life, Southerly, Women’s Agenda, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and in anthologies for UQP, Hardie Grant and Monash University Press. She is a frequent guest on panels for ABC’s Radio National, The Drum and Q and A, Channel 7’s Sunrise, the All About Women festival and The Festival of Dangerous Ideas. As a playwright, her work has been performed across Australia and the UK, in the US and Canada, and in Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Germany and Austria, and she is the recipient of three Premier’s awards for stage writing. Her first novel, Burnt Snow, was published by Pan Macmillan in 2010. Born in Sydney, Van is a very proud alumnus of Port Hacking High School Miranda, the University of Wollongong, the University of Sheffield (UK) and Melbourne Uni. She is active on Twitter via @vanbadham.

As a theatremaker Van had more than 100 international productions of her work. In 2015, she was under commission for new plays with the Tasmanian Theatre Company and the Melbourne Theatre Company. In 2017, she is under commission from Luxi, in Sunderland, UK. Her most recent theatre projects include the critically-acclaimed Late Night Story at the Adelaide Fringe 2015, Notoriously Yours at the 2014 Edinburgh festival and also in 2014 The Trollhunter – a Melbourne Comedy Festival show with Catherine Deveny, and Big Baby: Boss of the World – a collaboration with Terrapin, the national puppet company, which toured statewide.

Internationally, Van’s works for stage and musical theatre have appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, Adelaide Festival, New York Summer Play Festival, in Australia for Malthouse Theatre, Griffin Theatre, HotHouse Theatre, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and Merrigong Theatre, in London at the Royal Court Theatre, the Bush (for Paines Plough), the Finborough and Theatre503, and toured extensively in the UK, across her native Australia and to the US, Iceland, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Slovenia.

The BBC World Service, Radio 4 and Radio 3 have produced her radio dramas. She trained in writing for television on attachment to BBC serial Holby City and her award-winning short film, Octopus, screened in the Dungog, Tropfest Australia, Munich International, Berlin International and LA Shorts festivals. Van is the winner of numerous awards: in 2015, she was awarded the NSW Premier’s Award for Best Play, the West Australian Premier’s Book Award for Best Play, was a finalist for a Kennedy Award for Journalism, shared the Victorian Greenroom Association Award for Best Production with her collaborators as the writer of The Bloody Chamber for Malthouse Theatre. She also won three awards including Best Play in the Adelaide Fringe Awards with Notoriously Yours.