Serena Coady is a playwright and journalist living in London. Born in Penang and raised in a small town in New South Wales, she is led by a deep curiosity about the worlds she moves through.
In 2025, she was a top 10 finalist for the Martin-Lysicrates Prize, one of Australian theatre's most prestigious prizes. Her play The Last Woman of Sailean, a dystopian climate comedy-drama, was longlisted for the Theatre503 International Playwriting Award, the Woven Voices Prize, and the Ilfeld Prize. In 2024, her play, Bin Room, was shortlisted for The Cooper Prize. She is currently developing a theatrical adaptation of Nicole W. Lee's award-winning poem, Deluge: A Chinese Almanac.
Serena graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London, with an MA Dramaturgy & Writing for Performance, and is an alum of New Earth Theatre’s Writing Academy.
In 2026, she was selected for the Great Migrations Film Lab, delivered by MilkTea Films and supported by the British Film Institute, where she is developing her first feature screenplay, Python, an East meets Western.
With a 14-year career in journalism, she has written feature stories for The Independent, CNN, Vox, Dazed, i-D, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Refinery29, Insider, Australian Geographic, and more. She is a long-time contributing writer for frankie magazine and has worked as a news editor across several Condé Nast titles. For her journalism, she was nominated for IPSE's UK Freelancer of the Year award. In 2024, her audio drama The Beanie Baby Heist of ’97 was produced by Vespucci.
Her short fiction, Hardened Skin, was published in The London Magazine. She is currently working on Soft Machinery, a collection of eight short stories.
Libido Sewer is her semi-regular newsletter.
Serena is excited by work that combines humour, absurdism, love, nature, mixed cultures, and feral women.
Contact: serenacoady@gmail.com
(not on social media
unless you count Substack)