Kim Westwood

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

Kim Westwood

She is an Aurealis Award winner[1] and twice finalist[2] for her short stories, a number of which have appeared in Years Best anthologies in Australia and the USA, as well as broadcast on radio[3] and podcast.[4] 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.[5] Her second novel, The Courier's New Bicycle (2011), was selected for the Honour List of the 2011 James Tiptree, Jr. Award,[6] and won an Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel[7] 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"[8] with a "brilliantly evoked atmosphere of secrecy and threat"[9] carried by a "strong, empathetic central character [and] fast paced narrative".[10]

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.”[11] 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.”[12]

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
  • 2002 Aurealis Award, Horror Short Story: ‘The Oracle’
  • 2011 Scarlet Stiletto Awards Judges' Prize: 'Trouble in Nine Acts'
  • 2011 Aurealis Award, Best Science Fiction Novel, The Courier's New Bicycle
  • 2012 Ditmar Award, Best Novel, The Courier's New Bicycle

Shortlisted
  • 2005 Aurealis Award, Science Fiction Short Story: ‘Terning tha Weel’
  • 2008 Aurealis Award, Fantasy Short Story: ‘Nightship’
  • 2008 Aurealis Award, Science Fiction Novel: The Daughters of Moab
  • 2011 James Tiptree, Jnr. Award: The Courier's New Bicycle
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References
  1. Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2002
  2. Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2005, 2008
  3. The Book Show, ABC Radio National, June 2007
  4. Terra Incognita: the Australian Speculative Fiction podcast site, March 2009
  5. Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2008
  6. http://tiptree.org/award/2011-james-tiptree-award/honor-list
  7. Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2011
  8. Australian Bookseller+Publisher, July 2011
  9. Sydney Morning Herald, 27/8/2011
  10. The Canberra Times, 3/9/2011
  11. Australian Speculative Fiction: A Genre Overview, Donna Maree Hanson (2004)
  12. Lucy Sussex, The Sunday Age, 2 November 2008
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