Kate Grenville (born 14 October 1950) is one of Australia's best-known authors. She's published seven novels, a collection of short stories, and four books about the writing process.
Her books have been awarded many prizes in Australia, as well as the Commonwealth Prize and Britain's Orange Prize. The Secret River was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.
Her novels have been published all over the world and been translated into many languages. Two have been made into feature films.
Grenville was one of three children born to Kenneth Grenville Gee, a lawyer and later judge, and Isobel Russell, a pharmacist. After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney, she worked in the film industry, mostly editing documentaries at Film Australia. In 1976, she went to the UK on a working holiday for six months, and ended up being away for seven years. She lived in London and Paris, and wrote fiction while supporting herself by doing film-editing, writing, and secretarial jobs. In 1980 she went to the University of Colorado at Boulder to do a Masters degree in creative writing. She returned to Australia in 1983 and became a sub-editor at SBS Television in the subtitling department. She won a literary grant in 1986 and left SBS to pursue her writing. For many years, the University of Sydney allowed Grenville to use a room in which to write and, since the early 1990s, she has been an honorary associate of the university.
In 2006 she was awarded a Doctorate of Creative Arts by the University of Technology, Sydney for which The Secret River and Searching for the Secret River were significant submissions for her Doctorate under the supervision of Associate Professors Glenda Adams and Paula Hamilton.
In 2010 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of New South Wales.
Kate Grenville lives in Sydney with her husband, son and daughter.
Grenville is learning to play the cello, including performing in an amateur orchestra.
Kate Grenville's reputation as a short story writer was made by the publication in 1984 of her collection Bearded Ladies On its publication, Peter Carey wrote "Here is someone who can really write."
Lilian's Story was her first published novel (1985) and won the Vogel/Australian Award. It has become one of Australia's best-loved novels and was filmed (starring Ruth Cracknell and Toni Collette).
Dreamhouse followed in 1986, appearing as the film Traps a few years later. Joan Makes History - the recipient of an Australian Bicentennial Commission - was published in 1988.
In 1994 Grenville returned to the characters and setting of Lilian's Story with a companion novel - Dark Places - that re-tells the events of the earlier novel from the point of view of Lilian's incestuous father. Dark Places won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 1995. (In the US this novel is titled Albion's Story.)
The Idea of Perfection appeared in 2000 and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, at the time Britain's richest literary award.
In 2006 The Secret River was published, the first of Grenville's books that take Australia's colonial past, and relations with Australia's indigenous people, as its subject. The Secret River was inspired by the story of her own great-great-great grandfather, a convict sent to Australia from London in 1806. This book won the Commonwealth Prize, the Christina Stead Award, and the NSW Premier's Community Relations Prize, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
Searching for The Secret River ( 2006) is a memoir about the research and writing of the novel, tracing the journey of her increasing awareness of how Australia's colonial past informs its present.
The Lieutenant (2008) is set thirty years earlier than The Secret River. Based on the historical notebooks of Lieutenant William Dawes, it tells the story of the friendship between a soldier with the First Fleet and a young Gadigal girl. These two novels together explore something of the complexity of black-white relations in Australia's past.
Grenville has also written or co-written several books about the writing process which are widely used in Creative Writing workshops and in schools and universities: The Writing Book; Writing from Start to Finish; and Making Stories ( co-written with Sue Woolfe).
Grenville has been awarded fellowships from the International Association of University Women and from the Literary Arts Board of the Australia Council. Her novels have all been published in the UK and US as well as Australia and have been translated into many languages, including German, Swedish, French, Hebrew and Chinese.
Grenville's early fiction presented characters trying to free themselves from social and gender stereotypes. Bearded Ladies is a collection of short stories about women trying to free themselves from the gender stereotypes of their society: metaphorically although not literally they are the "bearded ladies" of the title.
Llian's Story, set in the early twentieth century, takes as its subject a woman who rejects her middle-class background and the conventional future that's expected of her. Instead she chooses to live as a street person, making a living by offering recitations from Shakespeare. At the end of her life she declares joyously : "Drive on, George. I am ready for whatever comes next."
Joan Makes History is a satirical re-writing of Australia's history, foregrounding the women rather than the men. Joan is an Everywoman character who in various guises lives through all the iconic moments of Australia's past. She "makes history" both by simply living her life, and by (re)making history by writing it.
Dreamhouse is a black comedy about a marriage on the rocks. It explores themes of both men and women freeing themselves from stereotypes to accept their true selves. Both partners in the marriage are attracted to their own sex: the wife is prepared to acknowledge that and act on it while the husband refuses to.
The Idea of Perfection is about people haunted by the impossible ideal of perfection. The two main characters are both middle-aged and frumpish, and consider themselves unlovably flawed. The journey they make is to recognise that to be "imperfect" is simply to be human, and carries its own power. As the epigraph from da Vinci asserts : "An arch is two weaknesses that together make a strength".
The Secret River is set in early nineteenth century Australia and is based on the story of one of Grenville's convict ancestors, a London boatman transported for theft. She takes that story as a means of exploring a wider theme: the dark legacy of colonialism, especially its impact on Australia's Aboriginal peoples. The title comes from the anthropologist WEH Stanner, who wrote about a "secret river of blood flowing through Australia's history" : the story of white Australia's relationship with the Aboriginal people.
The Lieutenant is the story of one of the very earliest moments of black-white relationship in Australia, at the time of first settlement in 1788. Based on a historical source - the Gadigal-language notebooks of Lieutenant William Dawes - the novel tells the story of a unique friendship. In learning the Gadigal language from a young girl, Dawes wrote down word-for-word parts of their conversations. Grenville has used these fragments as the basis for a novel exploring how it might be possible for two people to reach across the gulfs of language and culture that separate them, and arrive at a relationship of mutual warmth and respect.
The themes of The Secret River and The Lieutenant reach beyond Australia: both books have been widely read in other countries where colonialism has left a problematic legacy.
Grenville frequently does extensive research for her novels, often using historical or other sources as the starting-point for the work of the imagination. She says of her books that they are "sometimes inspired by historical events, but they are imaginative constructs, not an attempt to write history."
Stylistically Grenville frequently writes prose that could be called "poetic" . The form of a sentence is as important to her as its content.When questioned about this, she's said "I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that." She has experimented with different ways to indicate direct speech, including italics, in order to present a seamless continuity of narrative.
Joan Makes History: A Novel (1988) ISBN 0-7022-2174-0
Dark Places (1994) ISBN 0-330-33549-9 (alternative title: Albion's Story)
The Idea of Perfection (1999)
The Secret River (2005)
The Lieutenant (2008)
Non-fiction
The Writing Book: A Manual for Fiction Writers (1990) ISBN 0-04442124-9
Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (1993), with Woolfe, Sue ISBN 1-86373316-7
Writing from Start to Finish: a Six-Step Guide (2001)
Searching for the Secret River (2006) ISBN 1-921145-39-0
Translations
Grenville's work has appeared in: Swedish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Czech, Bulgarian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, and Mandarin.
