Australian writer
Rebecca Giggs is a Perth-based Australian nonfiction writer, known for Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
Career
Giggs studied at the University of Western Australia. She holds an LLB, BA Arts (Hons) and a PhD in ecological literary studies conferred in 2014.[1]
Giggs is an honorary fellow at the Macquarie University in Sydney.[2] She was awarded the 2017 Mick Dark flagship fellowship by Varuna for "The Whale in the Room", the working title for Fathoms.[3] She won support from Writers Victoria through the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund to visit the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany as a writing fellow in 2018.[4]
As an essayist, Giggs has contributed to The Atlantic on science subjects from "Why We're Afraid of Bats" to "Human Drugs Are Polluting the Water—And Animals Are Swimming in It".[5]
Her first book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale, was published in 2020 worldwide by Scribe[6] and by Simon & Schuster in the USA.[7]
Awards and recognition
Kirkus Reviews named Fathoms in their "10 Top Summer Reads in Nonfiction"[8] and described the book as "a thoughtful, ambitiously crafted appeal for the preservation of marine mammals".[9] In November 2020 Giggs won the Nib Literary Award[10] and in February 2021 she won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction for Fathoms.[11] Her book was also shortlisted for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction[12] and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.[13] Fathoms won the Premier's Prize for an Emerging Writer at the 2020 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards[14] and was shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize.[15] In 2021 Fathoms was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, alongside David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet and others, in the Global Conservation Writing category.[16] She was shortlisted for the 2021 Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing for "Soundings", an extract from Fathoms.[17][18]
References
External links
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