Rebecca Giggs is an author and essayist. Her first book is Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
Fathoms has received positive critical attention in national publications and podcasts — Rebecca has spoken about the book as a guest of CBC, BBC Radio 4, ABC Radio National, the Sydney Writers' Festival, and Melbourne's Wheeler Centre. Fathoms won the 2020 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Prize for Literature, and the Royal Zoological Society's Whitley Award for Popular Zoology. In the US, the book was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize and the 2021 ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; it was also longlisted for the 2021 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
Rebecca's nonfiction essays have been shortlisted for the Australian Book Review Calibre Prize and the Woollahra Digital Literary Award; a number of these works are currently taught in universities around Australia. Rebecca's writing has been translated into Korean, Spanish, Finnish and Norwegian. Rebecca has been a recipient of writing fellowships hosted by organisations including the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society (Munich); the Mick Dark Residency at Varuna, the National Writing House (New South Wales); and the AsiaLink Foundation (Tokyo and Kyoto).
Having grown up in Perth, Western Australia, she now splits her year between Perth and London.
MEDIA BIO
Image Credit: Leanne Dixon, 2020
EVENTS
2021
March — May, Writing Creative Nonfiction Course I [online $] Faber Writing Academy
06 March, Nature Writing Workshop [online $]; WritingSA
21 February, in conversation with Chris Flynn [His Majesty's Theatre, Perth]; Perth Literature Weekend
20 February, in conversation with Mike Bianco [His Majesty's Theatre, Perth]; Perth Literature Weekend
2020
'Fathoms' longlisted for the 2021 PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
'Fathoms' shortlisted for the ALA 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction
'Fathoms' AWARDED the 2020 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, for excellence in research and nonfiction writing
'Fathoms' AWARDED the 2020 Royal Zoological Society's Whitley Award for Popular Zoology
'Fathoms' a finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
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Past Events
02 December 2020; Glen Eira Libraries Talk
01 December 2020; National Maritime Museum (UK) Talk
24 November 2020; Wollongong Writers' Festival, in conversation with Laura Jean McKay
23 November 2020; 'Greenhouse' talk for the environmental humanities research group at the University of Stavanger, Norway
22 November 2020; 'Word for Word' National Nonfiction Festival — Panel Conversation with Nib Award Finalists
24 September 2020; B List Bookclub with the State Library of NSW, Hosted by Bri Lee.
11 September 2020; Write Around the Murray, in conversation with James Bradley.
07 August 2020; Point Reyes Books, in conversation with Robert Moor.
06 July 2020; Avid Reader, in conversation with Angela Dean.
01 July 2020; The Wheeler Centre, 'Fathoms: a Digital Scavenger Hunt.'
Press Mentions & Interviews
Podcasts & TV
Media Photos
Image Credit: Leanne Dixon, 2020
Image Credit: Leanne Dixon, 2020
