Leah Purcell has won the top prize at this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for her play The Drover’s Wife, a radical retelling of Henry Lawson’s short story. It is the first time that a play has taken out the award.

^{Leah Purcell in The Drover’s Wife. Photograph © Brett Boardman}

As well as winning the $10,000 Book of the Year award, Purcell also took home the $30,000 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting. Earlier this year, she was awarded the $100,000 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature for the play – the nation’s richest literary award.

The Drover’s Wife – which Purcell wrote, directed and starred in – premiered at Belvoir St Theatre in September 2016. The production won four awards at the Sydney Theatre Awards, where it was named Best Mainstage Production for 2016. It also took out Best New Australian Work, Best Director of a Mainstage Production (Leticia Caceres) and Best Score or Sound Design of a Mainstage Production (The Sweats).

Purcell was read the story by her mother as a child and still has that same tattered book. In her stage adaptation – which Caceres called “a rough-edged stone cast straight...