Gabe McDonnell

Gabe is a Hutt girl at heart and was born in the Valley in 1974. Upon completing an English and Art History degree at Victoria University of Wellington, she began writing seriously in 1996 when accepted into Bill Manhire´s Original Composition class.

After writing and producing one act plays, she was commissioned to write Hark for the Young & Hungry season in 2000. In the same year she premiered her first one-woman play, The Inept at the 2000 SheBang Women Playwrights Festival at BATS Theatre, which saw her nominated for the Peter Harcourt Best New Writer award at the 2000 Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards. The Inept has been published in the anthology Red Light Means Stop (Women´s Play Press, 2003).

In 2001 Gabe completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria. Her thesis was her first full-length play Year of Grants, which was chosen for the 2002 Adam Play Reading Series at Downstage.

In 2003 she had a lab season of her one-woman play Talent at BATS, and produced at Circa Studio in May 2004. Theatre collaborations include Welcome to Superbia! (BATS and Silo, 1999), FatMan Fox Livingstone (BATS, 2002) and Black Body (BATS, 2002).

Gabe has also written for television, Telly Laughs 1 & 2, The Strip and Freaky!, and has had short fiction published in Takahe and short story anthologies.