Name Kim Westwood Role Author | Books The Courier's New Bicycle | |
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Nominations Ditmar Award for Best Novel | ||
Kim Westwood is an Australian author born in Sydney and currently living in Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory.
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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.”