Tim Winton

Australian · born 1960

Timothy John Winton was born on August 4, 1960, in Subiaco, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, and grew up nearby in Karrinyup before his family moved to the port town of Albany when he was twelve, following his father's police transfer. His father, a motorcycle policeman, was left bedridden and disfigured by a drunk driver when Winton was five, a childhood rupture that surfaces throughout his fiction. Winton decided at age ten that he would become a writer, and while still a student at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, now Curtin University, he wrote An Open Swimmer, which won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1981 and launched his career before he had even finished his degree. His second novel, Shallows, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1984, the first of an eventual record four wins. Cloudstreet followed in 1991, winning the Miles Franklin again in 1992; The Riders (1994) earned him the first of two Booker Prize shortlistings the following year; Dirt Music (2001) brought a third Miles Franklin and a second Booker shortlisting in 2002; and Breath (2009) brought a fourth Miles Franklin. Cloudstreet in particular, a sprawling saga of two families sharing one Perth house across twenty years, is widely read as a defining novel of modern Australia. Alongside fiction Winton has written children's books, story collections including The Turning, and the memoir-essay collection The Boy Behind the Curtain. He married his childhood sweetheart Denise at twenty-one, and they raised three children together while living for stretches in Europe before settling back on the Western Australian coast that saturates his prose. A prominent voice in the campaign to save Ningaloo Reef from the early 2000s, work recognized with the inaugural Australian Society of Authors Medal in 2003, Winton has spent decades campaigning for Australia's reefs and coastline; a newly discovered Kimberley fish, Hannia wintoni, was named for him in 2020. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2023 for services to literature and conservation, and continues to write and live in Western Australia.