kim westwood – bio

I was born in Sydney, Australia. Shortly after, my family relocated to Wellington, New Zealand. I was a weedy, asthmatic kid who devoured books like dinner. This made me want to cook up my own stuff. The first story I wrote was a song. Unfortunately, I had to sing it at school assembly—a trauma still not shucked from my atoms.

Under the illusion the world was lush lawns, fern-filled gullies and very big hills, I returned with my family to Australia. It was Dubbo, Western NSW, mid-summer. I thought we’d come to hell: burning skies and melted bitumen, snakes and spiders in the blood red dirt, and hornets chasing us out of the backyard toilet.

The family moved two hundred kilometres down the road to Bathurst, where I went to school until I couldn’t stand it any more, and left. For a while I lived on a farm by a river where I learnt to crutch sheep with hand shears, raise poddy calves and hypnotize chooks. I began to write again, but mainly on paper napkins in coffee shops. Then I moved into a derelict house with no electricity where there were tiger snakes under the living room rug and ghosts in the ballroom. I got myself a typewriter and wrote by candlelight.

Deciding I was meant to be a classical guitarist, I abandoned the typewriter for six hours a day of music practice. Unfortunately, once I got to music school I discovered I wasn’t meant to be a classical guitarist after all, and left, clutching my Bachelor of Music, the parchment all crinkled and leathery from tears.

I’ve done all kinds of awful work to support my café and serviette habit, and even tried academia, but it didn’t make me happy. I went back to writing, this time in someone else’s garage with gaps under the walls for the little crawly animals to come and go, and where every night a brawl of possums partied on the roof.

Finding temporary sanctuary in the nocturnal world of theatre, my next story was a performance for dancer, light and shadow. The City of Midnight had two brief, luminous theatre seasons in Melbourne and Canberra before joining the dark ephemera of time. Feeling bereft, I bought myself a motorbike and a tent, and took off west, where I learnt to cherish the vast expanses that had so frightened me when I was young. Under burning skies in the blood red dirt I wrote travel stories for the wallabies and bull ants.

Belatedly I realized what I most like to do is write about a near future where something has been turned on its head. My first story, ‘The Oracle’, was born with a distinctly apocalyptic air. I sent it to a local competition that said ‘speculative’, thinking, I’m that. It won, but they forgot to tell me. After it was published, it won another award. This one I made it to—and scurried out of, clutching my shiny prize like a talisman.

I began shaving stories from my bones. Across this time the daughters of Moab were born from a floating rib. I took them on retreat to a wonderful writers’ centre called Varuna, thanks to a fellowship. They grew into my first novel, which has been called many things, including science fiction, and difficult; but I prefer my own made-up term, which is ‘poetic apocalyptic’.

My second novel skidded into existence on a courier's bike in the atmospheric alleyways of a turned-on-its-head Melbourne. Enter Salisbury Forth: animal protection vigilante, gender transgressive and accidental sleuth.