Tim Winton
Tim Winton was born in 1960 in Perth, Western Australia, the state in which he continues to live and to which his fiction is deeply connected. He studied creative writing at Perth's Curtin University, and soon after established a promising career as a novelist with An Open Swimmer. This first novel secured Winton the 1981 Australian/Vogel Award, for an original unpublished manuscript by an Australian writer under the age of 35. Just three years later he won the Miles Franklin Award for Shallows; he went on to win this award again for Cloudstreet in 1995 and Dirt Music in 2002. Winton's most recent novel, Breath, again brought him plaudits, scooping the Miles Franklin for an unprecedented fourth time.
On the international stage, the Winton was short-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 1995 for The Riders, for which he was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia/South Pacific category) that same year. He was again short-listed for the Man Booker in 2002 for Dirt Music, the novel for which he was also awarded a NSW Premier's Literary Award. His work has been translated into 25 languages.
It's great to think that Australians would honour writers in the same way that it has honoured sports stars.
A number of Winton's books have been adapted for stage and screen or are in development, including In the Winter Dark, That Eye, the Sky, Cloudstreet, The Riders, Dirt Music and Breath.
Testament to Winton's place in Australian cultural life, he has been named a Living Treasure by the National Trust, has received a centenary medal for his service to literature and the community and been awarded the ASA Medal. Besides being a writer of fiction for adult readers and children, Tim Winton is an advocate for the environment and for marine life. He was listed in the Bulletin's 100 Most Influential Australians list in 2006.
