Writer awarded for visceral story of hope: [1 Edition]
Stapleton, John. The Australian; Canberra, A.C.T. [Canberra, A.C.T] 11 May 2001: 2.
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Abstract
Yesterday she was awarded one of the country’s most prestigious accolades for women writers, The Kibble Award, with an accompanying $20,000 prize. [Inga Clendinnen] is most famous for her scholarly work, notably Reading the Holocaust, which in 1999 was named Best Book of the Year by The New York Times.
Clendinnen has a formidable reputation as an academic historian, with her work on the Aztecs and Maya receiving international recognition. Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir is entirely different.
Full Text
A LIVER transplant might not sound like the most promising or inspirational start for a book.
But in the hands of Inga Clendinnen, her experiences struggling with liver disease have been transformed into a hymn of hope called Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir.
Yesterday she was awarded one of the country’s most prestigious accolades for women writers, The Kibble Award, with an accompanying $20,000 prize. Clendinnen is most famous for her scholarly work, notably Reading the Holocaust, which in 1999 was named Best Book of the Year by The New York Times.
Far from being an inaccessible academic, Clendinnen presents as both charming and personable, a 66-year-old grandmother who has been married for almost half a century.
On winning a prize that only women can enter, she says she normally prefers open competition, but in the category for which theKibble Prize is dedicated, life writing, she believes it is vital that women’s work be encouraged.
“Women’s life writing is about the moral economy of domestic life, of ordinary life, and we have particular problems having attention paid to that,” she said.
“We don’t have much access to the experiences that life writing focuses on, not because it is trivial but because it is the … crucial underpinning of much grander events.”
Clendinnen has a formidable reputation as an academic historian, with her work on the Aztecs and Maya receiving international recognition. Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir is entirely different.
She says that having lived an active and purposeful academic life, losing control in hospital had been alarming.
“With chronic liver disease, you lose vocabulary, you lose memory,” she says.
Judges of the Kibble Award described the book as “one of the most unusual memoirs to appear in recent years”.
Illustration
Caption: Garden of life:Picture: Chris Pavlich; Photo: Photo