“Both a serial romantic and a truly gifted novelist”
Mariella Frostrup
“Winton is not a great Australian novelist; he is a great novelist, full stop”
The London Times
Thomas Keneally’s appearance was one of the highlights of Dublin Writers Festival in 2013, and this year we’re delighted to welcome another of Australia’s greatest writers, Tim Winton. Since he wrote his first novel at the age of 19, Winton has amassed an astonishing body of work both for adults and children. His early novel Shallows won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s highest literary honour, but it was Cloudstreet, an uproarious tale of two families colliding in a run-down house in Perth, that set him on the road to international success. Since then Winton has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice and celebrated for his uniquely poetic style, soaked in the rich landscape and vernacular of Western Australia.
Like Georgie Jutland in Dirt Music or Fred Scully, the father in The Riders whose attempt to move his family to Ireland goes disastrously wrong, Winton’s protagonists are often troubled souls searching for something to believe in, and Tom Keely, protagonist of his new novel, Eyrie, is no exception. Divorced and unemployed, Keely wants nothing more than to wallow in his despair, until a chance encounter with two neighbours – a woman and her son – shakes him from his torpor and offers him another shot at life.