Tara June Winch Bio

At seventeen, Winch left home to travel across Australia.

She studied for a Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous Studies at Ginibi College, Southern Cross University, but left after the manuscript for her first book won the David Unaipon Award in 2004.

That prize, awarded for unpublished Indigenous writing through the Queensland Literary Awards, is where her publishing story begins.

The manuscript was subsequently published in 2006 by UQP.

That debut, Swallow the Air (UQP, 2006), announced something rare:the sophistication and subtlety of the prose belied Winch’s age; she was twenty-two, but wrote with the élan of those much more accomplished.

May, the protagonist, sets off to find her father and her Aboriginal identity. Her journey leads her from the Australian east coast to the far north, but it is the people she meets, not the destinations, that teach her what it is to belong.

Swallow the Air can be read as a novel with short chapters or as a series of interlinked short stories, a structural choice that suits the fragmented, searching quality of May’s experience. The Sydney Morning Herald judges wrote that the book “is distinguished by its natural grace and vivid language” and that it “strives to connect these experiences to broader social issues, though never in a didactic fashion.”

It won numerous literary awards, including the David Unaipon Award and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

The novel was listed on the HSC syllabus for Standard and Advanced English from 2009 to 2020, and a tenth-anniversary edition was published in 2016.

Two years after Swallow the Air was published, Winch was selected for one of the most prestigious mentorship programmes in international literature.

In 2008, she was mentored by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

The experience placed her in direct conversation with one of the world’s great literary voices at a formative moment in her career.

Her second book, the story collection After the Carnage, was published in 2016. It was longlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the Queensland Literary Award for a story collection.

Ranging from New York to Istanbul, from Pakistan to Australia, the stories chart the distances in their characters’ lives, whether they have grown apart from the ones they love, been displaced from their homeland, or are struggling to reconcile their dreams with reality.

The collection explored themes of marginalisation across multiple countries, illustrated through the lives of migrants, Aboriginal people, single mothers, and children in unstable homes.

The Australian observed that “Winch can pack a punch and break your heart within a few pages”, a blunt assessment that captures what makes the collection distinctive.

In 2018, she wrote the script for the Indigenous dance documentary Carriberrie, extending her storytelling from the page to the screen and stage.

Then came The Yield.

The book took almost a decade to write, during which Winch travelled frequently to the Wiradjuri country where her story is based.

She was inspired to write the story after attending a language workshop based on the Wiradjuri dictionary compiled by Uncle Stan Grant and Dr John Rudder.

Published by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House Australia in 2019, the novel contains three alternating narratives. In the first, Albert Gondiwindi, an Aboriginal Australian man, writes a non-linear record of his life by defining words in the Wiradjuri language. Albert is dying of cancer and wants to leave behind a message for future generations.

Upon his death, his granddaughter August, who had moved to England to get away from the town, returns for the funeral. After August learns the family’s home, an old mission station, will be destroyed to make way for a mine, she decides to stay, determined to save the home and land.

Meanwhile, the reader learns that Wiradjuri artefacts have long since been excavated and removed, detailed in letters written by Reverend Greenleaf, the missionary who started the school in the late nineteenth century.

The innovative conceit of the work is Winch’s use of the language of the Wiradjuri people, to both tell the story and to teach language words.

Australian Book Review’s Ellen van Neerven wrote:

“Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch is not afraid to play with the form and shape of fiction … Admirers of Kim Scott’s Taboo and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip will enjoy Winch’s Aboriginal realism.”

 The Prime Minister’s Literary Award judges described Winch as “a lyrical and generous writer” whose “prose shimmers through this extraordinary tale of cruelty, dislocation, love and resilience.”

The awards that followed in 2020 were extraordinary in their sweep.

The Yield took home Book of the Year (10,000),theChristinaSteadPrizeforFiction(40,000), and the People’s Choice award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, followed by the Miles Franklin Literary Award ($60,000).

Winch then won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, taking out the $80,000 fiction category.

The Yield also won the 2020 Voss Literary Prize.

The novel was subsequently shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize, and the Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2021.

Editions were published in the US, Canada, and the UK (HarperVia, HarperCollins, 4th Estate) and translated into French, Dutch, German, and Polish.

Winch has served as an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Project and is an ambassador for Children’s Ground.

Her writing has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, VICE, and McSweeney’s.

She has been working in film writing and on a fourth book.

She has lived in France since 2011, though she grew up in the seaside suburb of East Woonona on the New South Wales south coast.