Alex
Vickery-Howe

Dr Alex Vickery-Howe is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and essayist whose work moves between the political and the intimate, the theatrical and the cinematic.

He began in 2008 — and not in Australia. Once Upon a Midnight, a bilingual, bicultural horror rock musical, opened the inaugural Kijimuna Festival in Okinawa, Japan, before selling out at Adelaide's OzAsia Festival. The same year, A Stab in the Dark — a locked-island whodunnit built on the seven deadly sins — premiered at Higher Ground for the Adelaide Fringe. It was revived in Michigan eight years later. Together the two works earned him the Independent Arts Foundation Literature Award.

For the stage he writes political tragedies and dark comedies — among them Watchlist, a satire of love, activism and state surveillance, and Out of the Ordinary, a hyperreal comedy about the war between being normal and being extraordinary. Both premiered at Adelaide's Bakehouse Theatre and are published by Currency Press.

On screen, his short films have travelled international festivals, taking Best Horror and Best Thriller at the Global Independent Film Awards and Best Comedy in Los Angeles. He won the Pathways Screenplay Competition in 2017 and completed an internship with StudioCanal in screen assessment and development the following year.

He is a Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Flinders University, where he took his doctorate on writing for younger audiences and now teaches across Creative Writing, Screen and Drama — coordinating Writing for Performance and Narrative and Storytelling, and lecturing on The Fantastic. He co-hosts the Word Docs podcast with Sean Williams and Amy T. Matthews.

Alongside fiction and drama, Alex writes a regular essay column on Substack: caustic, funny and humane dispatches on Australian and global politics, the culture wars, satire, authoritarianism and class. He is a leftist willing to interrogate the left, a critic of grift wherever he finds it, and a defender of nuance in a world addicted to the binary.

The work shares a single instinct: to find the emotional charge in restraint, to follow the money under the argument — and to trust the dark.