Winton wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, while he was studying at university. Denise, his wife, was a student nurse who helped him recover from a car accident when he was 18. (A screen adaptation starring Mia Wasikowska and Eric Bana is slated to hit cinemas in January).Tim Winton was born in the suburbs of Perth, the Australian city where Cloudstreet takes place. Winton says he gets more fan mail about that book than anything else he's written. Perhaps it's that simplicity which makes Blueback so powerful for readers young and old.

There was almost no rewriting, it just came out formed.' Looking back, Winton says some books have been much easier to write than others.īlueback, a heartbreaking allegory about a boy, his mother and a blue groper, was written 'inside a business week,' Winton says. 'I reckon it took me ten years to not feel bad about doing well.' Pleasure and pain He felt indebted to the teachers and mentors who'd helped him to succeed, who didn't get the same accolades themselves. But when the awards started coming in, Winton was more embarrassed than proud. ( ABC Arts: Nina Otranto)Īnd good he was. 'It really knocked my socks off when I was a young person,' he said. Winton counts Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises among his favourite books. Growing up in a working-class family in suburban Perth, Winton understood that he lived on 'the wrong side of the wrong country in the wrong hemisphere'.Ī career in the arts was a radical aspiration. It's an unlikely story for any author, and would have been unimaginable for a young Tim, who decided at 10 years old that he was going to be a writer. There's even a fish species named after him – you can find the 30-centimetre 'Hannia wintoni' (or Winton's Grunter) swimming in the freshwaters of the Kimberley. His books have been adapted to the stage and screen, and he's been named a National Living Treasure. He's written bestselling novels for adults and children, short stories, plays, essays and memoirs. Three years later he won his first Miles Franklin Literary Award for Shallows (he's won the Miles four times to date, and shares the record for the most wins with the late Thea Astley). Loading.Īt 21 he won the Vogel's Literary Award for his first book, An Open Swimmer. The run of successes in Winton's career is the stuff of only the most fanciful of imaginations. 'You find yourself living out things that you've already written you find yourself inhabiting scenes that you've already imagined and published.' 'The wrong side of the wrong country'

Tim winton cloud street