Kim Scott

Kim Scott (born 18 February 1957) is an Australian novelist of Aboriginal Australian ancestry. He is a descendant of the Noongar people of Western Australia.

Early life and education

Scott was awarded a PhD with distinction from the University of Western Australia in 2012.

Career 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 1999, the Miles Franklin Award 2000, and the Kate Challis RAKA Award 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".

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. Following this he was appointed a member of The Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT), leading its Indigenous Culture and Digital Technologies research program.

Awards

1999 – Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction Award for Benang: From the Heart 2000 – (joint winner) Miles Franklin Literary Award for Benang: From the Heart 2011 – Miles Franklin Literary Award for That Deadman Dance 2011 – Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction Award and Premier's Prize for That Deadman Dance 2018 – Queensland Literary Awards, University of Queensland Fiction Book Award for Taboo 2019 – Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, for Taboo 2019 – shortlisted for 2019 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Fiction, for Taboo 2020 – inducted into Western Australian Writers Hall of Fame 2023 – Inaugural Indigenous Studies Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities