Battling chronic fatigue syndrome as a teenager and growing up in the Pilbara town of Newman, Claire Tonkin needed to find a creative outlet.

For Tonkin, television was an obvious way to escape and she turned her love of the small screen into scriptwriting. This weekend she will receive huge accolades as she travels to New York to collect the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award.

"I always loved television," she says. "I was really sick when I was a teenager and so I watched an awful lot of television. We didn't have a cinema up there (in Newman) so TV was very important."

Tonkin had her first taste of TV from the other side at the age of 23, putting her scriptwriting degree at Edith Cowan University on hold to get practical experience on the Channel 7 show Always Greener in Sydney.

But after moving her car and all her belongings across the Nullarbor, she was told the show had been cancelled. She can now laugh about her first foray into television because it turned into a six-week stint on All Saints, followed by two years of scriptwriting at Channel 7. Now she is a drama executive at Channel 10, working on script and casting approval for shows like Neighbours.

Yet Tonkin's interest in scriptwriting never disappeared, and in 2007 she won an Australian Writers' Guild Award for her work. "I've always been creative and when I found screenwriting everything sort of clicked and I just knew that was what I wanted to do," she says.

A few people - including her boss at Channel 10, Rick Maier - suggested she enter her newest script, for a drama titled Me and Mine, for this year's Sir Peter Ustinov Award. The award is presented by the International Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences for an original script written by a non-US citizen younger than 30.

At 29, Tonkin jokes that she just scraped in.

She says the most exciting part of winning will be when actors perform rehearsed readings from her script at the award ceremony on Sunday. "The fact that you are going to hear your words read out and people are going to hear it, that's the really big prize for a writer."

Tonkin says the script follows the story of children trying to find their place in their family, an issue made more complicated because one child is adopted.