Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light in the sky with their burning. “Dogs get howling all down the way,” he wrote, in a paragraph that I still think about to this day. I tore through his family epic, the Booker-shortlisted Cloudstreet, in my early teens, enamored with the rare literary portrayal of Perth and Winton’s accessible, lyrical prose. By that age, for me, his books had become synonymous with high art. I even took a photo with Winton at the ceremony.

I placed in that competition in 2014, when I was fifteen, author of a dubious short story about a son and his abusive father. For years, the Subiaco Library in Perth has run the Tim Winton Young Writers’ Prize, for West Australians under 18. His work has been adapted a dozen times for screen and stage.

Since 1982, he has published twelve novels, six short-story collections, seven works of non-fiction and three plays, as well as countless essays, articles and stories. His words crawl in under your blood and stay there. Grammarless, dialect-heavy and unapologetically bleak, Winton produces frustrating work that splits apart Australia’s bigoted, broken underbelly. The international success of other (largely male) authors aside - twice-winner of the Man Booker, Peter Carey Marcus Zusak Patrick White - it seems to be Winton’s brutal lyricism that lingers and curdles in our collective cultural imagination. There is no possible discussion of Australian literature without the mention of Winton’s name. For better or worse, I have walked in his footsteps. I ran by the same river, and drank coffee from the same cafes I even attended the same university. I attended primary school in the suburb where he was born. Like Winton, I grew up in Perth, in the corner of south-west Australia. Yet its production, and Winton’s continued dominance of the Australian literary world, made me consider my own long and fraught relationship to his work. I knew intrinsically that any attempt to conceptualize Winton’s prose in that novel was hopeless, like touching your hand to a plastic candle and waiting for the burn. A movie adaptation was released last year, to dismal, lackluster reviews.

Nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize, Dirt Music is part-thriller, part-romance, set in the uncompromising West-Australian outback. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Tim Winton’s Dirt Music, one of his most well-known novels.

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