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An Interview With Tim Winton
| Article
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20325 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
2,184 Words |
| Author
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Susan B. Reno
Susan B. Reno is associate senior editor of the Book World
section of The World & I. |
He lives with his family in a cottage by the sea, in a small fishing village in Western Australia. There no one is the slightest bit impressed by the fact that he writes books--even that he has written ten books in ten years, all of which have sold well and remain in print.
Born in 1960 and educated in Albany and Perth, Western Australia, Tim Winton published his first novel, An Open Swimmer, when he was just twenty years old. Since then there have been four other novels--Shallows (1984), That Eye, The Sky (1986), In the Winter Dark (1988), and Cloudstreet; two collections of stories--Scission (1985) and Minimum of Two (1987); and three children's books--Jesse; Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo; and The Bugalugs Bum Thief. Most of Winton's fiction centers on a sensitive adolescent or young adult male protagonist involved in a quest for faith and identity.
An Open Swimmer received Australia's Vogel Literary Award in 1981. Shallows won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize, in 1984. So far, Cloudstreet, simultaneously published in Australia and Great Britain in 1991, was awarded the Australian National Book Council's Banjo Award; in Great Britain, the novel was Pan Picador's nominee for the Booker Prize, and it won the Deo Gloria Book Award.
Several of Winton's previous books have been published in the United States: two novels, That Eye, The Sky (Atheneum) and Shallows (Atheneum), and two collection of stories, Scission (Penguin) and Minimum of Two (Atheneum). Australian film-makers are turning three of his books--That Eye, The Sky; Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo; and An Open Swimmer--into films.
Winton says that he never feels quite right unless he can look to the west and see the ocean. Cloudstreet was written during his first trip abroad, its author "hopelessly homesick." The trip took place in 1987-88, after he won a travel scholarship, the Marten Bequest. He and his family lived in the Australia Council writer's studio in Paris for six months, in the gatehouse of a medieval castle in Tipperary, Ireland, for the next six months, and finally in a cottage on the Greek island of Hydra. During these eighteen months overseas, Winton found that he missed the sound of Australian voices more than anything else.
Winton doesn't follow trends or try to please academics. Perhaps it is the isolation of living ninety miles north of Perth, and a life revolving around his family, his writing, and fishing. The
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