Library Catalogue
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Tim Winton : a celebration by Call Number: 823.3 WIN Literature - Australian LiteratureISBN: 0642107173Publication Date: 1999 -
Tim Winton: The writer and his work by Call Number: 823.3 WIN Performance - PlaysISBN: 0732955882Publication Date: 1999Table of contents includes: An open swimmer, Shallows, That eye, the sky, In the winter dark, Lockie Leonard, Cloudstreet, The riders -
Blueback by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 9780143304333Publication Date: 1998Abel Jackson loves to dive. He's a natural in the water. He can't remember a time when he couldn't use a mask and snorkel to glide down into the clear deep. Life is tough out at Longboat Bay. Every day the boy helps his mother earn their living from the sea and the land. It's hard work but Abel has the bush and the sky and the bay to himself. Until the day he meets Blueback, the fish that changes his life. Blueback is a story about people learning from nature. About a boy and his life-long friend. -
Breath by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 9780241015308Publication Date: 2008Bruce Pike can hear the sea at night and longs to go to the shore. When he befriends Loonie, his small town's wild boy, that dream is realized. Together, intoxicated by the treacherous power of the waves and by the immortality of youth, the two boys defy all limits and rules. Pikelet learns what it is to be extraordinary, feels exhilaration for the very first time, and -- caught up in love and friendship and an erotic current he cannot resist -- he understands the true meaning of fear. These are experiences that will far outlast his adolescence. How, then, to mask the emptiness of leaving such intensity behind? -
Cloudstreet by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 9780143569725Publication Date: 1991Two rural families - the Pickles and the Lambs - flee to the city after separate catastrophes. They find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives again from scratch - and for twenty years, they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts. -
Dirt Music by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 0330363239Publication Date: 2001Georgie Jutland's life is a mess. She is stuck in a remote area of Western Australia with a fisherman she doesn't love and two children whose dead mother she can never replace. Her career is in ruins and she has fallen into a domestic routine of social isolation and blurry nights loitering in cyberspace, until she meets the local poacher Luther Fox. -
Eyrie by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 9781926428536Publication Date: 2013Eyrie tells the story of Tom Keely, a man who’s lost his bearings in middle age and is now holed up in a flat at the top of a grim highrise, looking down on the world he’s fallen out of love with. He’s cut himself off, until one day he runs into some neighbours: a woman he used to know when they were kids, and her introverted young boy. The encounter shakes him up in a way that he doesn’t understand. Despite himself, Keely lets them in. What follows is a heart-stopping, groundbreaking novel for our times, funny, confronting, exhilarating and haunting, populated by unforgettable characters. It asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing. -
Island Home by Call Number: A823.3 WIN Australian - Significant Western AustraliansISBN: 9781926428741Publication Date: 2015Tim Winton's beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how this unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. For over thirty years, Winton has written novels in which the natural world is as much a living presence as any character. What is true of his work is also true of his life: from boyhood, his relationship with the world around him -- rockpools, seacaves, scrub and swamp -- was as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets of the south-east, walking in the high rocky desert fringe, diving at Ningaloo Reef, bobbing in the sea between sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, with its rhythms, its dangers, its strange sustenance, and learned to see landscape as a living process. Island Home is the story of how that relationship with the Australian landscape came to be, and how it has determined his ideas, his writing and his life. It is also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet. Much more powerfully than a political idea, or an economy, Australia is a physical entity. Where we are defines who we are, in ways we too often forget to our detriment, and the country's. -
Lockie Leonard, Legend by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 0330364626Publication Date: 1997Lockie Leonard's survived the worst year on record. His first year of high school, settling into a new town, his mad love affair - it's all behind him. He's about to turn fourteen and things are looking up. But the world of weirdness hasn't finished yet. His little brother's hormones have kicked in and that's not a pretty sight. His lino-munching baby sister refuses to walk or talk. His dad starts arresting farm animals for a hobby and his poor mum suddenly won't stop crying. Then an old flame comes scorching back into his life. Ouch! -
Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 0330274465Publication Date: 1993Nothing's simple for Lockie Leonard. Dumped by his girlfriend, he's back to being the loneliest kid in town until he makes friends with the weirdest human being he's ever met. As if that isn't enough, Lockie decides to save the planet. In the middle of all this the inevitable happens. Yes, he falls in love: he drops like a ton of bricks for a girl who's not even out of primary school yet, and to make matters worse she surfs better than he ever will. TOTAL LIFE DISASTER. If it wasn't so ridiculous a kid would get depressed. Can a thirteen-year-old surfrat have a headbanger for a best friend,stay in love with an eleven-year-old grommet and still save his town from industrial pollution? SURE. AS IF! -
Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 9780143300960Publication Date: 1990Lockie Leonard, hot surf-rat, is in love. The human torpedo is barely settled into his new school, and already he's got a girl on his mind. And not just any girl: it has to be Vicki Streeton, the smartest, prettiest, richest girl in class. What chance have you got when your dad's a cop, your mum's a frighteningly understanding parent, your brother wets the bed and the teachers take an instant dislike to you and then you fall in love at twelve-and-three-quarter years old? -
The Riders by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 9780732907907Publication Date: 1994Fred Scully waits at the arrival gate of an international airport, anxious to see his wife and daughter. After two years in Europe they are finally settling down. He sees a new life before them, a stable outlook again, a fresh start, a cottage in the Irish countryside that he's renovated by hand. He's waited, sweated on this reunion. He does not like to be alone - he's that kind of man. The flight lands, the doors at the airport hiss open...Scully's life falls apart. -
Scission by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 9780140274011Publication Date: 1985Tim Winton's first collection of stories deals with men, women and children whose lives are coming apart and whose hearts are breaking. These spare, jagged stories, in which people struggle with change and disintegration, are vintage Winton. -
Shallows by
Call Number: F WIN - Australian and Aboriginal FictionISBN: 9780140258530Publication Date: 1984Shallows is set in a small whaling town in Western Australia, where land-based whaling has been a tradition for over 150 years. When Queenie Cookson decides to join an antiwhaling protest group, she defies her husband, her ancestry, and her community. Winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in Australia, this eloquent and moving novel speaks with immediacy and passion of the conflict between the values of a closeknit, traditional society and the evolving mores of the wider world. -
That Eye, The Sky by Call Number: F WIN - RealityISBN: 9780140274042Publication Date: 1986A tale about a boy's vision of the world beyond, and the blurry distinctions between the natural and supernatural.
At twelve years old, Morton - Ort for short - is not quite a child, but not yet an adult; his isolated outback world is an intriguing combination of boyish innocence, adolescent confusion and burgeoning awareness. When his father is seriously injured in a car crash, however, that world is suddenly thrown into complete disarray and the whole family have to adjust. -
The Turning by Call Number: F WIN - Australian and Aboriginal FictionISBN: 9780330422734Publication Date: 2005Tim Winton is at his best with seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they've made for themselves. Beautifully crafted, and as tender as they are confronting, these elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through. From the internationally acclaimed author of 'Dirt Music' comes an outstanding work of fiction that will resonate with readers everywhere.
Bio
Tim Winton was born in Perth, Western Australia, but moved at a young age to the small country town of Albany.
While a student at Curtin University of Technology, Winton wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer. It went on to win The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1981, and launched his writing career. In fact, he wrote "the best part of three books while at university". His second book, Shallows, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1984. It wasn't until Cloudstreet was published in 1991, however, that his career and economic future were cemented.
In 1995 Winton’s novel, The Riders, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as was his 2002 book, Dirt Music. Both are currently being adapted for film. He has won many other prizes, including the Miles Franklin Award three times: for Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1992) and Dirt Music (2002). Cloudstreet is arguably his best-known work, regularly appearing in lists of Australia’s best-loved novels. His latest novel, released in 2013, is called Eyrie.
He is now one of Australia's most esteemed novelists, writing for both adults and children. All his books are still in print and have been published in eighteen different languages. His work has also been successfully adapted for stage, screen and radio. On the publication of his novel, Dirt Music, he collaborated with broadcaster, Lucky Oceans, to produce a compilation CD, Dirt Music – Music for a Novel.
He has lived in Italy, France, Ireland and Greece but currently lives in Western Australia with his wife and three children.
Bibliography
Novels
An Open Swimmer (1982)
Shallows (1984)
That Eye, The Sky (1986)
In the Winter Dark (1988)
Cloudstreet (1991)
The Riders (1994)
Blueback (1998)
Dirt Music (2001)
Breath (2008)
Lockie Leonard (1990-1997)
Eyrie (2013)
Short story collections
Scission (1985)
Minimum Of Two (1987)
A Blow, A Kiss (1985)
The Collected Short Novels of Tim Winton (1995)
The Turning (2005)
Plays
Rising Water (2011)
Signs of Life (2012)
Shrine (2013)
Children's books
Jesse (1988)
Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo (1990)
The Bugalugs Bum Thief (1991)
Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster (1993)
Lockie Leonard, Legend (1997)
The Deep (1998) – picture book illustrated by Karen Louise
Non-fiction
Land's Edge (1993) – with Trish Ainslie and Roger Garwood
Local Colour: Travels in the Other Australia (1994)
Down to Earth (1999) – text by Tim Winton and photographs by Richard Woldendorp
Smalltown (2009) – text by Tim Winton and photographs by Martin Mischkulnig
Island Home (2015)
Environmental Advocacy
Winton is actively involved in the Australian environmental movement. He is a patron of the Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) and is passionately involved in many of their campaigns, notably their work in raising awareness about sustainable seafood consumption. He is a patron of the Stop the Toad Foundation and contributed to the whaling debate with an article on the Last Whale website. He is also a prominent advocate of the Save Moreton Bay organisation, the Environment Defender’s Office, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and the Marine Conservation Society, with which he is campaigning against shark finning.
In 2003, Winton was awarded the inaugural Australian Society of Authors (ASA) Medal in recognition for his work in the campaign to save the Ningaloo Reef.
Winton keeps away from the public eye, unless promoting a new book or supporting an environmental issue. He told reviewer Jason Steger that "Occasionally they wheel me out for green advocacy stuff but that's the only kind of stuff I put my head up for."
Style and Themes
Winton draws his prime inspiration from landscape and place, mostly coastal Western Australia. He has said "The place comes first. If the place isn't interesting to me then I can't feel it. I can't feel any people in it. I can't feel what the people are on about or likely to get up to." His themes often centre on an issue which is described by the character Gail in The Turning when she says that "every vivid experience comes from your adolescence".
Winton revisits place and, occasionally, characters from one book to another. Queenie Cookson, for example, is a character in Breath who also appears in Shallows, Minimum of Two and in one of the Lockie Leonard books.