About Clare Mendes

Clare Mendes is an Australian writer. She was born in Melbourne in 1967, and currently lives, works and plays in this beautiful city.

Clare’s novels include Drift Street, The Curtain Raiser, A Race Across Burning Soil (HarperCollins) and The Unvoiced Consonant (Little Owl Press). Her radio plays have been produced by ABC Radio National. The Agreement, her first full-length stage play, was performed at La Mama Courthouse in October 2015 and her play Trash Goes Down The River was performed at Bluestone Church Arts Space in June 2017. A Flower for Moses was presented at Gasworks Arts Park in May 2021, and in June 2023 Clare finished a new play Skating in the Clouds with support from the Malcolm Robertson Foundation.  Read about these plays here. 

As a producer, Clare has produced MWT’s new plays since 2015, with recent theatrical seasons including St Kilda Stories (2017), Stark. Dark. Albert Park (2018), Beachside Stories (2019), The Metropolis Monologues & The City Park Plays (2020), The Best, The Fairest, The First (2021), Tales from the Jetty (2022), The Critical Marriage (2023) and How to Save a Tree (2023). For details of these productions, visit the Productions page on the MWT website.

Clare began her career as an advertising copywriter before working as a storyliner and scriptwriter for the TV soap “Neighbours”. She was Executive Director of the Fellowship of Australian Writers for over a decade, during which time she also oversaw the administration of FAW’s National Literary Awards. Clare has travelled extensively and has lived and worked in the US, South-East Asia and Latin America. She has a Cambridge teaching qualification which has taken her on language assignments around the world. She loves Jakarta, Hanoi and Trujillo, Perú, but her favourite neighbourhood will always be Park Slope, Brooklyn, where she lived in an illegal basement apartment kept warm by a maze of overhead pipes.

Clare graduated from The University of Melbourne with an Honors degree in Literature, and is completing a Master of Theatre and Performance at UNE. She is an Award School graduate, and the recipient of an Angus & Robertson Fiction Prize, an Asialink Award, an Ian Reed mentorship, a Varuna residency, a Playworks Script Award, a Creative Victoria grant and a Malcolm Robertson Foundation grant. View CV

The Company Manager of Melbourne Writers’ Theatre since 2015, Clare oversees this company’s rich calendar of events and diverse theatrical seasons. To learn more about MWT, visit melbournewriterstheatre.org.au