Louis Esson

Thomas Louis Buvelot Esson (10 August 1878 – 27 November 1943) was an Australian poet, journalist, critic and playwright.

He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland but moved to Melbourne, Australia when he was three. He attended the University of Melbourne and began working as a journalist and playwright soon after.

In the 1920s he was a co-founder of the Pioneer Players, a theatre company dedicated to the performance of Australian plays and the development of a national theatre. The Pioneer Players produced 18 new Australian plays in their four years of existence. The Pioneer Players have been called "a mismanaged collection of fly-by-night amateurs, but somehow he has come to be called 'The Father of Australian drama'".

Select plays

• Dead Timber (1911)
• The Time is Not Yet Ripe (1912)
• The Woman Tamer
• The Sacred Place
• The Drovers (1922)
• Mother and Son (1923)
• The Bride of Gospel Place (1926)

External links

• Louis Esson at Australian Dictionary of Biography
• Louis Esson at Australian Poetry Library
• Works by Louis Esson at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)