Kim Westwood

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

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Kim Westwood

She is an Aurealis Award winner and twice finalist 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 and podcast. 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. Her second novel, The Courier's New Bicycle (2011), was selected for the Honour List of the 2011 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and won an Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 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" with a "brilliantly evoked atmosphere of secrecy and threat" carried by a "strong, empathetic central character [and] fast paced narrative".

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.” 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.”

Bibliography

Novels

• The Daughters of Moab (HarperCollins, 2008)
• The Courier's New Bicycle (HarperCollins, 2011)

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

External links

• http://vanderworld.blogspot.com/2005/08/kim-westwood-another-australian-writer.html
• http://tiptree.org/award/2011-james-tiptree-award/honor-list

• Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2002
• Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2005, 2008
• The Book Show, ABC Radio National, June 2007
• Terra Incognita: the Australian Speculative Fiction podcast site, March 2009
• Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2008
• http://tiptree.org/award/2011-james-tiptree-award/honor-list
• Aurealis Awards winners archive, 2011
• Australian Bookseller+Publisher, July 2011
• Sydney Morning Herald, 27/8/2011
• The Canberra Times, 3/9/2011
• Australian Speculative Fiction: A Genre Overview, Donna Maree Hanson (2004)
• Lucy Sussex, The Sunday Age, 2 November 2008