Tim Winton

Tim Winton is an Australian author. He has published twenty-nine books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music).

Tim Winton was born in Perth, Western Australia, but moved at 12 to the small country town of Albany. While a student at the Curtin University of Technology, Winton wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer. It went on to win The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1981 and launched his writing career.

His second book, Shallows, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1984. However, it was not until Cloudstreet (1991) that his career and economic future were cemented. He has continued to publish fiction, plays, and non-fiction material.

In 1995 Winton’s novel The Riders was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as was his 2002 book, Dirt Music. Now both of them are adapted for film.

He has won many other prizes, including the Miles Franklin Award three times: for Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1992), and Dirt Music (2002). Cloudstreet is arguably his best-known work, regularly appearing in lists of Australia’s best-loved novels. His latest novel, released in 2013, is called Eyrie.

Tim Winton is now one of Australia's most esteemed novelists, writing for both adults and children. All his books are still in print and have been published in eighteen languages. Several of his works have also been adapted for the stage, screen, and radio.

His book Blueback, about a girl who befriends a wild blue grouper, was adapted into a film in 2022.

Winton also is an activist in the environmental movement and the patron of the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

" I have worked as an activist for 20 years or so, and I’ve done it reluctantly out of a sense of responsibility. I guess it’s a sacred responsibility. To the creation, to organic life, human and non-human.

Organic life is the central (and largely unacknowledged) miracle. So many of us live as if it’s inconsequential, this complex series of unlikelihoods to which we owe our existence. Part of its sacredness is its fragility.

We have the great gift and burden of consciousness. And we clearly have the means and the habits to destroy all this, all life as we’ve known it. There are urgent, practical reasons to work for life and against self-destruction, but they are moral and spiritual obligations, too," the author says.

Tim Winton has lived in Italy, France, Ireland, and Greece but currently lives in Western Australia with his wife and three children.

Photo credit: FB @timwintonauthor