Kim Scott – September 18 2016

Kim began writing for publication when he became a teacher of English and has had poetry and short stories published in a number of anthologies. His second novel, Benang: From the Heart, won the 1999 WA Premier’s Book Award, the 2001 Kate Challis RAKA Award, and earned him the distinction of being the first Indigenous author to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award. That Deadman Dance won the 2011 Miles Franklin Award, the 2011 ALS Gold Medal, 2011 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature, 2011 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction, 2011 Kate Challis RAKA Award, 2011 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book – Regional Winner, the 2010 Western Australian Premier’s Award for Fiction and was short-listed for many others. Kim is a proud descendant of the Wirlomin Noongar people of south coast Western Australia. He currently lives in Coolbellup, Western Australia, and is Professor of Writing in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University.

That Deadman Dance
Picador, 2010; ISBN 9781405040440

Young Noongar man, Bobby Wabalanginy, befriends the new arrivals in ‘the friendly frontier’, in and around what is now Albany, Western Australia, in the early 19th century. He hunts, tills, explores and establishes the fledgling colony with them. But slowly things begin to change. As the new arrivals impose ever stricter rules and regulations, Bobby’s Elders decide they must respond and he is forced to choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his settler friends.

True Country
Fremantle Press, 1993; ISBN 9781921361524

Billy is drifting, looking for a place to land. A young school teacher, he arrives in Australia’s remote far north in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and his future. He finds himself in a region of abundance and beauty but also of conflict, dispossession and dislocation. On the desperate frontier between cultures, Billy must find his place of belonging.