Kim Westwood

Kim Westwood is an Australian author born in Sydney and currently living in Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory.

Kim Westwood

She is an Aurealis Award winner[1] and twice finalist[2] 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[3] and podcast.[4] 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.[5] Her second novel, The Courier's New Bicycle (2011), was selected for the Honour List of the 2011 James Tiptree, Jr. Award,[6] and won an Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel[7] 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"[8] with a "brilliantly evoked atmosphere of secrecy and threat"[9] carried by a "strong, empathetic central character [and] fast paced narrative".[10]

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.”[11] 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.”[12]