Rebecca Giggs is a Perth-based Australian nonfiction writer, known for Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
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]
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 Excellence in Nonfiction for Fathoms. [11] 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. [12]
Year | Title | Award | Category | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | Fathoms | Kirkus Prize | Nonfiction | Finalist | [13] |
Nib Literary Award | — | Won | [10] | ||
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards | Emerging Writer | Won | [14] | ||
2021 | Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence | Nonfiction | Won | [11] | |
PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award | — | Shortlisted | [15] | ||
Stella Prize | — | Shortlisted | [16] | ||
Wainwright Prize | Global Conservation | Shortlisted | [12] | ||
"Soundings" | Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing | — | Shortlisted | [17] [18] |