The City of Perth Library, UWA Institute of Advanced Studies, UWA Publishing and Boffins Books are proud to present Josephine Wilson as she speaks about her book, Extinctions, to celebrate winning the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Josephine Wilson is a writer from our very own backyard. She won The Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for Extinctions, and now it's won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award. This is a great opportunity to hear some witty and sparkling commentary on Josephine's life and writing over some light refreshments.
Can't make it? We'll happily have a copy of Josephine Wilson's Extinctions signed for you. Simply contact us via phone, email, online or visit us in-store, and we'll take care of the rest.
In Extinctions, a compassionate and unapologetically intelligent novel, Josephine Wilson explores ageing, adoption, grief and remorse, empathy and self-centredness. Fred Lothian is a man in denial: a brilliant engineer, now retired and widowed. He knows that ‘for an engineer there was a bridge for every situation’; but solutions for the complexity of human problems elude him. So he looks away from his son’s tragic injury, his adopted Aboriginal daughter’s cultural loss: his only intimacy is with his collection of high design modernist objects. Only the intervention of his spirited next-door neighbour at his retirement village, Jan Venturi, forces him out of his carapace of self-absorption long enough to bring both comedy and recognition into his life, and some degree of redemption. Extinctions is set in Perth, a city of both recent settlement and ageless history, now disrupted; all the characters of Extinctions are negotiating geographical or familial disruption. Memory and love emerge as the countervailing forces to Fred’s blind egotism. The novel is also a meditation on survival: on what people carry, on how they cope, and on why they might, after so much putting their head in the sand, come to the decision to engage, and even change.
THE 2017 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD JUDGES' COMMENTS
Josephine Wilson's second novel, Extinctions, won the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award after winning the inaugural Dorothy Hewett Award in manuscript form. Josephine is a Perth-based writer whose career began in the area of performance. Her early works included The Geography of Haunted Places, with Erin Hefferon, and Customs. Her first novel was Cusp, (UWA Publishing, 2005). Josephine has lectured and taught in the tertiary sector. She is the busy parent of two children and works as a sessional staff member at Curtin University, where she teaches in the Humanities Honours Program, in Creative Writing and in Art and Design history. She completed her Masters of Philosophy at Queensland University and her PhD at UWA.
Photo credit: Peter Marko
