Winton, Timothy John

▪ 1996

      Australia's most successful author since Nobel laureate Patrick White, Tim Winton put another feather in his cap in 1995 when his novel The Riders became an international best-seller and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. His precocious talent had been recognized by the time he was 21, when he won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award for his first novel An Open Swimmer. His second, Shallows, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1984. By the time he was nominated for the Booker, Winton had written more than 10 other books, including Scission; That Eye, the Sky; Minimum of Two; Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo; Cloudstreet, which won the 1992 Miles Franklin Award; The Bugalugs Bum Thief; and Land's Edge.

      Born near Perth, Western Australia, on Aug. 4, 1960, Winton had decided by the age of 10 to be a writer. He studied creative writing at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, but his down-to-earth hobbies—sports and recreational surfing, fishing, camping, and "hanging out" in the old whaling port of Albany—gave him an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes that appealed initially to teenage readers.

      Although his earlier books were set mainly in Western Australia, for 18 months in 1987-88 Winton gathered material for The Riders while living with his wife and son in France, Greece, and Ireland. In a picaresque plot, the novel's Australian hero, Fred Scully, is shocked by the unexplained desertion of his wife, who fails to arrive at Dublin's Shannon Airport to rendezvous with Scully and join him in a new life in a restored Irish croft. The tension in the novel builds as Scully and his seven-year-old daughter travel across Europe, revisiting old family haunts in a fruitless hunt for an explanation and reconciliation. The calculated naiveté of style in the novel mirrors the unlikely background to the hero's apocalyptic adventures. "I guess deep down I'm one of these people who's not particularly articulate," said Winton, an observation that could explain his wide and popular attraction to readers of all ages and backgrounds and not just the nominators of the Booker Prize.

      (A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

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