Kate Grenville - Career

Career

Kate Grenville's reputation as a short story writer was made by the publication in 1984 of her collection Bearded Ladies. On its publication, Peter Carey wrote "Here is someone who can really write".

Lilian's Story was her first published novel (1985) and won the The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. It has become one of Australia's best-loved novels and was filmed (starring Ruth Cracknell and Toni Collette).

Dreamhouse followed in 1986, appearing as the film Traps a few years later. Joan Makes History - the recipient of an Australian Bicentennial Commission - was published in 1988.

In 1994 Grenville returned to the characters and setting of Lilian's Story with a companion novel - Dark Places - that re-tells the events of the earlier novel from the point of view of Lilian's incestuous father. Dark Places won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 1995. (In the US this novel is titled Albion's Story.)

The Idea of Perfection appeared in 2000 and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, at the time Britain's richest literary award.

In 2006 The Secret River was published, the first of Grenville's books that take Australia's colonial past, and relations with Australia's indigenous people, as its subject. The Secret River was inspired by the story of her own great-great-great grandfather, a convict sent to Australia from London in 1806. This book won the Commonwealth Prize, the Christina Stead Award, and the NSW Premier's Community Relations Prize, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Searching for The Secret River (2006) is a memoir about the research and writing of the novel, tracing the journey of her increasing awareness of how Australia's colonial past informs its present.

The Lieutenant (2008) is set thirty years earlier than The Secret River. Based on the historical notebooks of Lieutenant William Dawes, it tells the story of the friendship between a soldier with the First Fleet and a young Gadigal girl. These two novels together explore something of the complexity of black-white relations in Australia's past.

Sarah Thornhill (2011) is the sequel to The Secret River and takes up the story of William Thornhill's youngest daughter. It can be read as a stand-alone novel, without having read The Secret River.

Grenville has also written or co-written several books about the writing process which are widely used in Creative Writing workshops and in schools and universities: The Writing Book; Writing from Start to Finish; and Making Stories ( co-written with Sue Woolfe).

Grenville has been awarded fellowships from the International Association of University Women and from the Literary Arts Board of the Australia Council. Her novels have all been published in the UK and US as well as Australia and have been translated into many languages, including German, Swedish, French, Hebrew and Chinese.

Grenville's website is kategrenville.com and her Facebook fan page is www.facebook.com/kategrenville