Ben Winch

Benjamin Roy Winch (born Adelaide, 1973) is an Australian writer and musician.

Brought up in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, Winch performed in the alternative rock band Movement from 1990-92 before starting to write fiction.[1]

His first novel Liadhen was shortlisted in the 1994 Angus and Robertson Bookworld First Novel Award,[2] and published by Wakefield Press in 1995. Although heralded as part of the first wave of the Australian Grunge Lit movement, Liadhen is in fact a dreamlike and non-realistic story set in a fictional town in the Australian Alps, and incorporating few of the traits of urban-based dirty realism that characterised that movement.[3]

Winch's next novel, My Boyfriend's Father (Wakefield Press, 1996), was closer to the grunge mould. A first-person narrative told by a young female, My Boyfriend's Father documents the break-up of a family owing to drug and alcohol abuse and was shortlisted in both the 1996 New South Wales Premier's Christina Stead Award for Fiction and the inaugural Kathleen Mitchell Award.[4] In 1996 Winch also appeared at Adelaide Writers' Week and became the youngest ever recipient of a Fellowship for Literature from the Australia Council for the Arts.[5]

In the winter of 1997 Winch moved to Tasmania to work on his third novel, Vanishing Points, which remains unfinished.

In 2004 he returned to the Australian literary scene briefly via a spoken word/music collaboration with Adelaide poet Tim Sinclair entitled Brothers of the Head, a concept album about an unborn foetus trapped in his brother's skull.[6]

In 2009 he moved to Manchester, England, where he formed the band Shadow History with ex-Icicle Works bassist Chris Layhe.

Winch now lives in Mullumbimby, northern New South Wales, with his fiance and her three sons.

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ http://redroomcompany.org/poets_ben-winch.php Red Room Company website
  2. ↑ http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/31/3/3 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3, 3-43 (1996)
  3. ↑ http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443059909387538 Kirsty Leishman, 'Australian grunge literature and the conflict between literary generations', Journal of Australian Studies, 23:63,94 — 102 (1999) / 'Lit Grit Invades Oz-Lit', Murray Waldren, Rolling Stone (1995)
  4. ↑ http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/people/jenny-lee.html Jenny Lee, Meanjin / University of Melbourne
  5. ↑ http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/ The Australia Council
  6. ↑ http://redroomcompany.org/poets_ben-winch.php Red Room Company website http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an41528276 National Library of Australia

External links