Karolina Ristevski is an award-winning Macedonian Australian writer and the winner of STC’s 25th Patrick White Playwrights Award for her play River Was Here. She is one of Suzie Miller’s mentees for 2025, further cementing her place among the next generation of exciting playwrights and has been selected for the Australian Plays Transform – Playwriting Groups 2025.

Her play Cate Fucking Blanchett, developed during her 2019 Sydney Fringe Festival residency, made the final round of judging for the 2022 Shane and Cathryn Brennan Prize and attracted interest from London’s Royal Court Theatre.

She was selected for the coveted Merrigong Emerging Playwrights Program and longlisted for The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, where judges described her work as “beguiling” and recognised her as “a writer with rare talent.”

Karolina’s short story Wonderboy was published in Never Heard of Them: An Anthology for Emerging Writers, and her micro-fiction The Kiosk was performed by Little Fictions, featured at the Inner West Council’s Site and Sound Festival, and broadcast on the Little Fictions podcast. She is also a two-time finalist for the Born Writers Award with her stories Seventeen and The Experiment.

She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts with Distinction from the University of Wollongong, majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in Theatre.

Her writing isn’t abstract ideas; it is drawn from real life, shaped into something theatrical and compelling and known for its distinctive voice. She continues to push boundaries with form, offering powerful stories for her audiences. Her latest play River Was Here offers a poignant exploration of how the past can both haunt and define us. It doesn’t nudge; it jolts, like a cattle prod. Some will flee. But those who stay will find themselves inside an artist’s mind staging its own psyche.