Rebecca Giggs

Last updated

Rebecca Giggs is a Perth-based Australian nonfiction writer, known for Fathoms: The World in the Whale.

Contents

Career

Giggs studied at the University of Western Australia. She holds an LLB, BA Arts (Hons) and a PhD in ecological literary studies conferred in 2014. [1]

Giggs is an honorary fellow at the Macquarie University in Sydney. [2] She was awarded the 2017 Mick Dark flagship fellowship by Varuna for "The Whale in the Room", the working title for Fathoms. [3] She won support from Writers Victoria through the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund to visit the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany as a writing fellow in 2018. [4]

As an essayist, Giggs has contributed to The Atlantic on science subjects from "Why We're Afraid of Bats" to "Human Drugs Are Polluting the Water—And Animals Are Swimming in It". [5]

Her first book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale, was published in 2020 worldwide by Scribe [6] and by Simon & Schuster in the USA. [7]

Awards and recognition

Kirkus Reviews named Fathoms in their "10 Top Summer Reads in Nonfiction" [8] and described the book as "a thoughtful, ambitiously crafted appeal for the preservation of marine mammals". [9] In November 2020 Giggs won the Nib Literary Award [10] and in February 2021 she won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction for Fathoms. [11] Her book was also shortlisted for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction [12] and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. [13] Fathoms won the Premier's Prize for an Emerging Writer at the 2020 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards [14] and was shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize. [15] In 2021 Fathoms was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, alongside David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet and others, in the Global Conservation Writing category. [16] She was shortlisted for the 2021 Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing for "Soundings", an extract from Fathoms. [17] [18]

Related Research Articles

The Dylan Thomas Prize is a leading prize for young writers presented annually. The prize, named in honour of the Welsh writer and poet Dylan Thomas, brings international prestige and a remuneration of £30,000 (~$46,000). It is open to published writers in the English language under the age of forty. The prize was originally awarded biennially but became an annual award in 2010. Entries for the prize are submitted by the publisher, editor, or agent; for theatre plays and screenplays, by the producer.

Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages. Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.

Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (2010), and the essay collections, Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heather Rose</span> Australian author

Heather Rose is an Australian author born in Hobart, Tasmania. She is the author of the acclaimed memoir Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. She is best known for her novels The Museum of Modern Love, which won the 2017 Stella Prize, and Bruny (2019), which won Best General Fiction in the 2020 Australian Book Industry Awards. She has also worked in advertising, business, and the arts.

The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing was established in 2012 to recognise excellence in Australian science writing. The annual prize of A$7,000 is awarded to the best short non-fiction piece of science fiction with the aim of a general audience. Two runners up are awarded $1,500 each.

Emily Bitto is an Australian writer. Her debut novel The Strays won the 2015 Stella Prize for Australian women's writing.

Anna Krien is an Australian journalist, essayist, fiction and nonfiction writer and poet.

Bren MacDibble is a New Zealand-born writer of children's and young adult books based in Australia. Bren also writes under the name Cally Black. She uses the alias to distinguish between books written for younger children and books written for young adults.

The Nib Literary Award, established in 2002 at the suggestion of actor and producer Chris Haywood, the Patron of the Friends of Waverley Library, as The Nib Waverley Library Award for Literature and since 2017 known as Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature, is an Australian literary award for works in any genre, awarded annually at Waverley Library in Sydney. It is also known as 'The Nib': CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature.

Fiona Anna Wood is an Australian writer of young adult fiction. She is a three-time winner of the Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers award.

Laura Jean McKay is an Australian author and creative writing lecturer. In 2021, she won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel The Animals in That Country.

<i>Punch Me Up to the Gods</i> 2021 memoir by Brian Broome

Punch Me Up to the Gods is a memoir, written by Brian Broome and published May 18, 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction (2021), as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir or Biography (2022).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Veronica Gorrie</span> Aboriginal Australian writer

Veronica Gorrie is an Aboriginal Australian writer. She is a Krauatungalang Gunai woman. Her first book, Black and Blue: A memoir of racism and resilience, a memoir reflecting on her Aboriginality and the decade she spent in the police force, was released in 2021. Black and Blue won the Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia's richest literary award, in 2022.

Evelyn Araluen is an Australian poet and literary editor. She won the 2022 Stella Prize with her first book, Dropbear.

Rebecca Donner is a Canadian-born writer. She is the author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and The Chautauqua Prize She was a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship. She is currently a 2023-2024 Fellow at Harvard.

Brian Broome is an American memoirist, poet, and screenwriter from Ohio. He is best known for his award-winning memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods.

Ordinary Notes is a book by Christina Sharpe, published in April 2023 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book is a collection of 248 notes about black life. It was shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Laura Elvery is an Australian author and winner of the Queensland Literary Awards' Steele Rudd Award for her short story collection Ordinary Matter.

Robbie Arnott is an Australian author known for his novels, Flames, The Rain Heron and Limberlost, all of which were nominated for prestigious Australian literary awards.

References

  1. "Award Verification Service: Rebecca April Giggs". The University of Western Australia. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  2. "Rebecca Giggs". Macquarie University. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  3. "Varuna announces recipients of 2017 Residency Fellowships". Books+Publishing. 4 October 2016. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  4. "Writers Victoria announces Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund round-two recipients". Books+Publishing. 11 April 2018. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  5. Giggs, Rebecca. "Rebecca Giggs". The Atlantic. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  6. Giggs, Rebecca (2020). Fathoms: The world in the whale. Brunswick, Victoria: Scribe Publications. ISBN   978-1-925321-38-8. OCLC   1153440206.
  7. Giggs, Rebecca (2020). Fathoms: The world in the whale (First ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN   978-1-9821-2069-6. OCLC   1124313331.
  8. Liebetrau, Eric (6 July 2020). "10 Top Summer Reads in Nonfiction". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  9. "Fathoms: The World in the Whale". Kirkus Reviews. 15 May 2020. Retrieved 12 February 2021.
  10. "'Fathoms' wins Nib Literary Award". Books+Publishing. 12 November 2020. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  11. "Giggs wins ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal". Books+Publishing. 9 February 2020. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  12. "The 2020 Kirkus Prize". www.bookreporter.com. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  13. "Announcing the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists". PEN America. 10 February 2021. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  14. "WA Premier's Book Awards announced". Books+Publishing. 26 August 2021. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  15. "Stella Prize 2021 shortlist announced". Books+Publishing. 25 March 2021. Retrieved 25 March 2021.
  16. "Sethi, Winn and Rebanks shortlisted for Wainwright Prize". The Bookseller. 21 August 2021. Retrieved 5 August 2021.
  17. "Rebecca Giggs shortlisted for Bragg Prize for Science Writing | Rebecca-giggs-shortlisted-for-bragg-prize-for-science-writing | Scribe Publications". scribepublications.com.au. 13 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  18. "Bragg Prize for Science Writing shortlist announced". Books+Publishing. 12 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.