Kim Scott
Encyclopedia
Kim Scott is an Australian novelist of Indigenous Australian ancestry. He is a descendant of West Australian Noongar
Noongar
The Noongar are an indigenous Australian people who live in the south-west corner of Western Australia from Geraldton on the west coast to Esperance on the south coast...

 people.

Biography

Scott was born in Perth
Perth, Western Australia
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....

 in 1957 and is the eldest of four siblings with a white mother and an Aboriginal father.

Scott has written three novels and a children's book, and has had poetry and short stories published in a range of anthologies. He began writing shortly after becoming a secondary school teacher of English. His teaching experience included working in urban, rural Australia and in Portugal. He spent some time teaching at an Aboriginal community in the north of Western Australia, where he started to research his family's history.

His first novel, True Country, was published in 1993 with an edition published in a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 translation in 2005. His second novel, Benang, won the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards
The Western Australian Premier's Book Awards is an award for books, scripts, digital narrative and a People's Choice. Awards are provided by the Government of Western Australia, and the awards process is managed by the State Library of Western Australia...

 1999, the Miles Franklin Award
Miles Franklin Award
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin , who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career ...

 2000, and the RAKA Kate Challis Award 2001. Both novels were influenced by his research and seemed to be semi-autobiographical. The themes of these novels have been described as, "explor[ing] the problem of self-identity faced by light-skinned Aboriginal people and examine the government's assimilationist policies during the first decades of the twentieth century".

Scott was the first indigenous writer to win the Miles Franklin Award for Benang, which has since been published in translation in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 and the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

.

His book, Kayang and Me, was written in collaboration with Nyoongar elder, Hazel Brown, his aunt, and was published in May 2005. The work is a monumental oral-based history of the author’s family, the south coast Nyoongar people of Western Australia.

His latest novel That Deadman Dance (Picador, 2010) explores the lively fascination felt between Noongar, British colonists and American whalers in the early years of the 19th century. On 21 June 2011, it was announced that Scott had won the 2011 Miles Franklin Award for this novel. On the 26th July 2011 it has been announced 'That Deadman Dance has been shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Award for Fiction at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and the Deadly Awards.

Scott lives in Coolbellup, a southern suburb of Fremantle, Western Australia
Western Australia
Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...

, with his wife and two children.

Awards

  • 1999 - Western Australian Premier's Book Awards
    Western Australian Premier's Book Awards
    The Western Australian Premier's Book Awards is an award for books, scripts, digital narrative and a People's Choice. Awards are provided by the Government of Western Australia, and the awards process is managed by the State Library of Western Australia...

    , Fiction Award for Benang: From the Heart
  • 2000 - (joint winner) Miles Franklin Literary Award for Benang: From the Heart
  • 2001 - The Kate Challis RAKA Award for Creative Prose for Benang: From the Heart
  • 2011 - Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book south-east Asia and the Pacific for That Deadman Dance
  • 2011 - Miles Franklin Literary Award for That Deadman Dance
  • 2011 - ALS Gold Medal
    ALS Gold Medal
    The Australian Literature Society Gold Medal is awarded annually by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for “an outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year.” From 1928 to 1974 it was awarded by the Australian Literature Society, then from 1983 by the Association for...

     for That Deadman Dance
  • 2011 - Western Australian Premier's Book Awards
    Western Australian Premier's Book Awards
    The Western Australian Premier's Book Awards is an award for books, scripts, digital narrative and a People's Choice. Awards are provided by the Government of Western Australia, and the awards process is managed by the State Library of Western Australia...

    , Fiction Award and Premier's Prize for That Deadman Dance

Novels

  • True Country (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993)
  • Benang: From the Heart
    Benang
    Benang is a 1999 Miles Franklin Award winning novel by Australian author Kim Scott. The award was shared with Drylands by Thea Astley.Reviewing the novel for The Hindu, K...

    (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999)
  • Lost (Southern Forest Arts, 2006)
  • That Deadman Dance (Picador, 2010)

Short Stories

  • "An Intimate Act" in Summer Shorts by Peter Holland (Fremantle Press, 1993)
  • "Registering Romance" in Summer Shorts 3 : Stories - Poems - Articles - Images by Bill Warnock, et al., (Fremantle Press, 1995)
  • "Into the Light (after Hans Heysen's painting of the same name)" in Those Who Remain Will Always Remember : An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing by Anne Brewster, et al., (Fremantle Press, 2000)
  • "Damaged but Persistent" in Siglo no.12 Summer (2000)
  • "Capture", in Southerly (pp.24–33), vol.62 no.2 (2002)

External links

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