Barry Dickins

Barry Dickins (born 1949) is a prolific Australian author, artist, playwright and journalist, possibly best known for his historical stage drama Remember Ronald Ryan, a dramatization of the life and subsequent death of Ronald Ryan, the last man executed in Australia.

He was born in the Melbourne suburb of Reservoir. Leaving school early he worked in a factory and then as a set-painter for television. Through his association with La Mama Theatre, his first play, a translation of Ibsen's Ghosts, was performed in 1974. He has subsequently written a further nine plays. His play Remember Ronald Ryan won him the 1995 Victorian Premier's Literary Award. He has also written short stories, biography and other non-fiction and children's books.

On two occassions, Dickins has ventured into acting: During the early years of his career, he appeared in Barry Oakley's The Ship's Whistles, at the Pram Factory Front Theatre in 1978, with Paul Hampton as director. He then made an appearance in a 1985 revival of Graeme Blundell's Balmain Boys Don't Cry (renamed The Balmain Boys) at the Kinsela's Cabaret Theatre in Darlinghurst, New South Wales. He recently performed a dramatic reading of his new monologue, Ryan (a continuation of his earlier work Remember Ronald Ryan), which was performed as part of a QandA event held at Melbourne based bookshop, Collected Works.

In 2009, he published his memoirs Unparalleled Sorrow, which discusses his career and his battle with depression. 2015 will see the publication by Black Pepper publishing of A Line Drawing of My Father, a memoir of the authors' father Len Dickins who served in the Second World War and was a commercial printer thereafter. It also gives a portrait of the working class northern suburbs of Melbourne.

He is now writing for Fairfax Media in the Sunday Age as a Journalist.

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