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 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]