12LIT - The Turning: Home

The Turning comprises seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they've made for themselves.

These elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.

AusLit, 2017.

Born in Karrinyup, Western Australia, Tim Winton completed his high school education at Albany. Determined to be a writer from an early age, Winton subsequently studied creative writing at the West Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University). He became a professional writer and household name when, at the age of 21, he shared first prize in the 1981 Australian/Vogel National Literary Award for a manuscript that became An Open Swimmer (1982).

Several other books followed in the 1980s and he won his first Miles Franklin Award in 1984 for Shallows. He travelled overseas with his wife and young family in the late 1980s, but his work retained a strong attachment to the coastal regions of Western Australia, especially the areas around which he grew up. He returned to Western Australia to purchase a house on the coast and won his second Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1992, for Cloudstreet.

Nearly twenty years later, he was to adapt this novel for the screen with American writer Ellen Fontana, as the three-part series Cloudstreet, which won him a Western Australian Premier's Book Awards (Scripts) and drew nominations for both AACTA Awards and Logie Awards.

Winton has written a number of children's books; his award-winning 'Lockie Leonard Series' (published between 1990 and 1997) was adapted for television in 2007 as Lockie Leonard.

Other adaptations of Winton's works include John Ruane's film of That Eye, the Sky in 1994 and James Bogle's film of In the Winter Dark in 1998. His works Breath and The Turning have also been adapted to the screen more recently.

AusLit, 2018.