Kim Scott (born 18 February 1957) is an Australian novelist of

Aboriginal Australian Aboriginal Australians are the various Indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, such as Tasmania, Fraser Island, Hinchinbrook Island, the Tiwi Islands, and Groote Eylandt, but excluding the Torres Strait Islands ...

ancestry. He is a descendant of the

Noongar The Noongar (, also spelt Noongah, Nyungar , Nyoongar, Nyoongah, Nyungah, Nyugah, and Yunga ) are Aboriginal Australian peoples who live in the south-west corner of Western Australia, from Geraldton on the west coast to Esperance on the so ...

people of

Western Australia Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...

Biography

Scott was born in

Perth Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth i ...

in 1957 and is the eldest of four siblings with a white mother and an Aboriginal father. Scott has written five 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 translation in 2005. His second novel, ''Benang'', won the

Western Australian Premier's Book Awards The Western Australian Premier's Book Awards is an annual book award provided by the Government of Western Australia, and managed by the State Library of Western Australia. History and format Annual literary awards were inaugurated by the West ...

1999, the Miles Franklin Award 2000, and the

Kate Challis RAKA Award The Kate Challis RAKA Award is an arts award worth , awarded annually by the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia to Indigenous Australian creative artists. It is awarded in a five-year cycle, each year in a different area of the arts: ...

2001. Both novels were influenced by his research and seemed to be semi-autobiographical. The themes of these novels have been said to "explore 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 and the Netherlands. His book, ''Kayang and Me'', was written in collaboration with Noongar 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 Noongar people of Western Australia. His 2010 novel ''That Deadman Dance'' (Picador) 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. Scott also won the 2011 Victorian Premier's Prize for the same novel. Scott was appointed Professor of Writing in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts of Curtin University in December, 2011. He is a member of

The Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...

, leading it
Indigenous Culture and Digital Technologies
research program. Scott lives in Coolbellup, a southern suburb of Fremantle,

, with his wife and two children.

Awards

* 1999 –

, Fiction Award for ''Benang: From the Heart'' * 2000 – (joint winner)

Miles Franklin Literary Award The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–19 ...

for ''Benang: From the Heart'' * 2001 – The Kate Challis RAKA Award for Creative Prose for ''Benang: From the Heart'' * 2011 –

Commonwealth Writers' Prize Commonwealth Foundation presented a number of prizes between 1987 and 2011. The main award was called the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was composed of two prizes: the Best Book Prize (overall and regional) was awarded from 1987 to 2011; the Best ...

, Best Book south-east Asia and the Pacific, for ''That Deadman Dance'' * 2011 –

for ''That Deadman Dance'' * 2011 –

ALS Gold Medal The Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (ALS 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 ...

for ''That Deadman Dance'' * 2011 –

, Fiction Award and Premier's Prize for ''That Deadman Dance'' * 2018 –

Queensland Literary Awards The Queensland Literary Awards is an awards program established in 2012 by the Queensland literary community, funded by sponsors and administered by the State Library of Queensland. Like the former Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, the QLA ...

, University of Queensland Fiction Book Award for ''Taboo'' * 2019 –

Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing The Victorian Premier's Prize for Indigenous Writing is a prize category in the annual Victorian Premier's Literary Award The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards were created by the Victorian Government with the aim of raising the profile of cont ...

, for ''Taboo'' *2019 – shortlisted for 2019 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Fiction, for ''Taboo'' *2020 – inducted into Western Australian Writers Hall of Fame

Bibliography

Novels

* ''True Country'' (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993) * '' Benang: From the Heart'' (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999) * ''Lost'' (Southern Forest Arts, 2006) * '' That Deadman Dance'' (Picador, 2010) * ''Taboo'' (Picador Australia, 2017)

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) * Escapeó Éll Ćhapo

Children's picture book

* ''The Dredgersaurus'' (Sandcastle demoliter Books, 2001)

Non-fiction

* ''Kayang and Me'' with Hazel Brown (Fremantle Arts Press, 2005)

Notes

External links

Biography of Kim Scott and the review of his Benang book

Australian Government – The Arts
(Retrieved (31 March 2008)
Lisa Slater 'Kim Scott's ''Benang'': An Ethics of Uncertainty' ''JASAL'' 4 (2005)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scott, Kim 1957 births Living people Indigenous Australian writers Miles Franklin Award winners ALS Gold Medal winners Writers from Perth, Western Australia 20th-century Australian novelists 21st-century Australian novelists Curtin University faculty Noongar people Australian male novelists