AustLit

Director and script-writer.

Glenda Hambly's involvement in film and television began as early as the late 1970s, when she was both researcher for and director of The Distant Lens: Western Australia's Moving Memories (1979), a fifty-minute documentary made for the Film and Television Institute of Western Australia and the Perth Institute of Film and Television.

Hambly remained associated with the Western Australian film and television industry for her next work: Fran (1985), a film showing a single mother's attempts to balance her love and care for her children with her own need for an intimate relationship, was filmed in Perth and produced by Barron Entertainment. Written and directed by Hambly, the film won her an AFI Award and an AWGIE Award for her script, as well as attracting AFI Award nominations for Best Director and Best Film.

After Fran, Hambly concentrated more on script-writing than on directing, writing episodes of The Flying Doctors (1986) and Home and Away (1988). She retuned briefly to directing with a succession of episodes for children's adventure series Ship to Shore (1993) and in 2000 both wrote and directed Waiting at the Royal, in which four women with seemingly little in common enter the same maternity ward: Waiting at the Royal got Hambly her second directing nomination (AFI Award for Best Direction in a Television Drama, 2000), and won both the Banff Rockie Award for Best Made-for-TV Movie (Banff Television Festival, 2001) and the Logie Award for Most Outstanding Telemovie/Mini-Series (2001).

She is also credited as the script editor for John Cundill's 1993 film Love in Limbo.

Most of Hambly's work since the early 1990s, however, has been as a script-writer. She has contributed episodes to television series including Lift Off (1992), Secrets (1993), Law of the Land (1993), Ship to Shore (1993), R.F.D.S. (1993), Mercury (1996), Police Rescue (1996), State Coroner (1997), Raw FM (1997), and Neighbours (2001-2003).