Kim Westwood

Kim Westwood was born in Sydney and spent several years of her childhood in New Zealand. She has always written, secretly and obsessively, while doing other more acceptable things; but that changed when her story 'The Oracle' won the 2002 Aurealis Award. Since then, more stories have appeared: in anthologies such as Agog!, Eidolon I and Dreaming Again, as well as in Year's Bests in Australia and the US, and on ABC Radio National. She is the recipient of the prestigious Varuna Writer's Fellowship for The Daughters of Moab, her first novel. Westwood developed her distinctive visual sensibility while working as a theatre performer and deviser. Darkly poetic, her stories are underscored by feminist and gender politics, and have a preoccupation with humanity's capacity for destruction and equal instinct for survival. Most are set in a near-future Australia. Of this she says, "My imagination has a chemical reaction to living in Australia, and responds strongly to its particular properties."