Nowra had not yet seen Harry Kippax's review in The Sydney Morning Herald but it was a shocker, and White hand-delivered an outraged letter to the editor to the Herald offices.

When Kippax, the all-powerful theatre critic, refused to let the letter be published, White paid for it to run as an advertisement in the newspaper's theatre section for two weeks.

White was always ''a great defender of my work'', Nowra said on Friday as he received the Patrick White Literary Award with a cheque for $23,000.

He was, however, a prickly supporter who walked out of Nowra's translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, leaving his tearfully admiring partner, Manoly Lascaris, to watch with Nowra.

The pug-loving novelist once confronted Nowra about his chihuahuas: ''What would you know? At least pugs have balls in proportion to their body.''

Nowra is only the third playwright to win in the 40 years since White established the award with his Nobel prize money, after Alma de Groen in 1998 and John Romeril in 2008.

The judges chose Nowra for his body of work as a ''prolific, passionate and principled writer who has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature across many fields''.

His sometimes controversial writing showed ''an uncompromising, passionate, but also comic or satirical engagement with issues of oppression, injustice, alienation, and corruption''.

His best-known plays included Cosi and Radiance, both adapted to film, but his last plays were The Boyce Trilogy for the Stables Theatre in 2005-2007.

Nowra, 63 next month, said film and novels had overtaken theatre since the 1970s and '80s and he now had a ''slight agoraphobia'' of the rehearsal room.

His recent works included contributions to the television series First Australians and The Straits, a book of essays about his obsessions, Chihuahuas, Women and Me, the novels Ice and Into that Forest, and the recent Kings Cross: A Biography, about the area he and his wife, writer Mandy Sayer, rarely leave.