Since 1982, he has published twelve novels, six short-story collections, seven works of non-fiction and three plays, as well as countless essays, articles and stories. His words crawl in under your blood and stay there. Grammarless, dialect-heavy and unapologetically bleak, Winton produces frustrating work that splits apart Australia’s bigoted, broken underbelly. The international success of other (largely male) authors aside - twice-winner of the Man Booker, Peter Carey Marcus Zusak Patrick White - it seems to be Winton’s brutal lyricism that lingers and curdles in our collective cultural imagination. There is no possible discussion of Australian literature without the mention of Winton’s name. For better or worse, I have walked in his footsteps. I ran by the same river, and drank coffee from the same cafes I even attended the same university. I attended primary school in the suburb where he was born. Like Winton, I grew up in Perth, in the corner of south-west Australia. Yet its production, and Winton’s continued dominance of the Australian literary world, made me consider my own long and fraught relationship to his work. I knew intrinsically that any attempt to conceptualize Winton’s prose in that novel was hopeless, like touching your hand to a plastic candle and waiting for the burn. A movie adaptation was released last year, to dismal, lackluster reviews.
Nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize, Dirt Music is part-thriller, part-romance, set in the uncompromising West-Australian outback. Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives.This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Tim Winton’s Dirt Music, one of his most well-known novels.
The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.Ĭhance, hardship and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet. The Lambs are industrious, united and – until God seems to turn his back on their boy Fish – religious. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday.Īfter two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth.
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