Kim_Westwood

Kim Westwood

Kim Westwood

Australian author

Kim Westwood is an Australian author born in Sydney and currently living in Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory.

Kim Westwood

She has won the Aurealis Award twice, a Scarlet Stiletto Award and a Ditmar Award. She was shortlisted for six awards including the Aurealis Awards, James Tiptree, Jnr., the Ned Kelly and the Davitt awards for her short stories and novels, a number of which have appeared in Years Best anthologies in Australia and the US, as well as broadcast on radio[1] and podcast.[2] She received a Varuna Writer's House Fellowship for her first novel, The Daughters of Moab, published in 2008 and shortlisted for an Aurealis Award.[3] Her second novel, The Courier's New Bicycle (2011), was selected for the Honour List of the 2011 James Tiptree, Jr. Award,[4] and won an Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel[5] as well as a Ditmar Award for Best Novel (Ditmar Award results). It has been reviewed as "a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale"[6] with a "brilliantly evoked atmosphere of secrecy and threat"[7] carried by a "strong, empathetic central character [and] fast paced narrative".[8]

Westwood developed her distinctive visual sensibility while working as a theatre performer and deviser. Darkly poetic, her stories are underscored by feminist and gender politics, and have a preoccupation with humanity's capacity for destruction and equal instinct for survival. Most are set in a near-future Australia. Of this she says, "My imagination has a chemical reaction to living in Australia, and responds strongly to its particular properties".[9] By example, The Daughters of Moab has been reviewed as "a richly peopled canvas, of which perhaps the real star is the landscape, so intensely depicted as to be almost a presence".[10]

Bibliography

Novels

Short stories

  • "The Oracle", Redsine #9 (2002); Znak Sagite (2005)
  • "Temenos", Agog! Smashing Stories (2004)
  • "Stella’s Transformation", Encounters – an Anthology of Australian Speculative Fiction (2004); Year's Best Fantasy #5 (2005)
  • "Tripping Over the Light Fantastic", Orb Speculative Fiction #6 (2004); The Year’s Best Australian SF and Fantasy Vol. 1 (2005)
  • "Haberdashery", The Devil in Brisbane (2005)
  • "1Blue", Agog! Ripping Reads (2006)
  • "Cassandra’s Hands", (2006) in Eidolon I (ed. Jonathan Strahan, Jeremy G. Byrne)
  • "Cassandra's Hands", (author's revised version) Escape anthology (2011)
  • "Terning tha Weel", Aurealis #36 (2005); The Year’s Best Australian SF and Fantasy Vol. 3 (2007)
  • "Nightship", Dreaming Again (2008)
  • "Last Drink Bird Head", Last Drink Bird Head (2009)
  • "By Any Other Name", Anywhere But Earth (2011)

Fellowships

  • Varuna Writers' House Fellowship (2004)

Awards and nominations

Award

Shortlisted

References

  1. [1]
    The Book Show, ABC Radio National, June 2007
  2. [2]
    Terra Incognita: the Australian Speculative Fiction podcast site, March 2009
  3. [3]
    Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2008
  4. [4]
    "2011 Honor List — James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council". tiptree.org. Archived from the original on 15 May 2012.
  5. [5]
    Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2011
  6. [6]
    Australian Bookseller+Publisher, July 2011
  7. [7]
    Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 2011
  8. [8]
    The Canberra Times, 3/9/2011
  9. [9]
    Australian Speculative Fiction: A Genre Overview, Donna Maree Hanson (2004)
  10. [10]
    Lucy Sussex, The Sunday Age, 2 November 2008
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