Williamson is widely recognised as Australia’s most successful playwright and over the last fifty years his plays have been performed throughout Australia and produced in Britain, United States, Canada and many European and Asian countries.

A number of his stage works have been adapted for the screen, including The Removalists, Don’s Party, The Club, Travelling North, Emerald City, Sanctuary and Brilliant Lies.

David Williamson has won the Australian Film Institute film script award five times, for Petersen (1974), Don’s Party (1976), Gallipoli (1981), Travelling North (1987) and Balibo (2009), and has won twelve Australian Writers’ Guild AWGIE Awards. He also wrote the screenplay for Phar Lap (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously, (1983) receiving a nomination for best screenplay from the Writer’s Guild of America.

He wrote the screenplay for Showtime’s On the Beach which won the Australian AFI award for best miniseries and was nominated for the Golden Globe awards in the U.S. He also wrote the screenplay for the HBO miniseries A Dangerous Life, about the fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines which made the critics top ten list of the year in both New York and Los Angeles. In 2015 he was awarded the Special NSW Premier’s Literary Award for lifetime achievement.