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Tom Griffiths Tom Griffiths i(A28053 works by)
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

' Tom Griffiths is the W K Hancock Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra. His books and essays have won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism, including the NSW Book of the Year Award, the Eureka Science Book Prize, the Ernest Scott Prize for History, the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. His research, writing and teaching are in the fields of Australian social, cultural and environmental history, public history, comparative global environmental history, the writing of non-fiction, and the history of Antarctica. In the summer of 2002/03 he travelled to Antarctica as a Humanities Fellow with the Australian Antarctic Division, and in 2012 he was invited by the Australian Government to join the centennial voyage to Mawson’s Huts. In 2008 he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen and was then appointed by the Vice-Chancellor as Adjunct Professor of Climate Research at Copenhagen. In 2009 his Alfred Deakin prize-money funded a community historical project with the people of Steels Creek who had suffered in the Black Saturday firestorm: two collaborative books and a film were released in 2012-13. He is Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, a Professorial Associate of the National Museum of Australia and Director of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU.' (Source: The Australian Academy of the Humanities website)

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon The Art of Time Travel : Historians and Their Craft Carlton : Black Inc. , 2016 9458277 2016 multi chapter work criticism biography

'Writing good history is a high-wire act of balance and grace. Historians scour their own societies for vestiges of past worlds, for cracks and fissures in the pavement of the present, and for the shimmers and hauntings of history in everyday action.

'In The Art of Time Travel, eminent historian and award-winning author Tom Griffiths explores the craft of discipline and imagination that is history. Through portraits of fifteen historians at work, including Inga Clendinnen, Judith Wright, Geoffrey Blainey and Henry Reynolds, he observes how a body of work is constructed out of a life-long dialogue between past evidence and present experience.

'Riveting, beautiful and elegantly written, this landmark book conjures fresh insights into the history of Australia and revitalises our sense of the historian’s craft – what Tom Griffiths calls “the art of time travel”.' (Publication summary)

2019 shortlisted Educational Publishing Awards Australia Tertiary Education Scholarly Non-Fiction Book of the Year
2017 shortlisted Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award
2017 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Non-Fiction
2017 shortlisted CHASS Australia Prizes Australia Book Prize
2017 shortlisted Colin Roderick Award
2017 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
y separately published work icon Slicing the Silence : Voyaging to Antarctica Sydney : University of New South Wales Press , 2007 Z1365300 2007 single work prose travel 'In the summer of 2002-2003 Griffiths voyaged the Southern Ocean to Antarctica. He was with the first Australian ship to 'slice the silence' of a year, arriving at Casey Station to deliver the new team of 'winterers' and take away the old. Griffiths interweaves his own diary entries with essays that explore the human history of the mysterious continent of ice.' - back cover
2008 joint winner Prime Minister's Literary Awards The Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History Prize shared with Robert Kenny's The Lamb Enters the Dreaming.
2008 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
2007 winner Queensland Premier's Literary Awards Best Non-Fiction Book
2007 shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award Non-Fiction Prize
Latitude 1998 single work essay
— Appears in: AQ : Journal of Contemporary Analysis , November-December vol. 70 no. 6 1998; (p. 20-25)
Griffiths discusses the epic, ill-fated journey of Scott to the Antarctic and the diaries that Scott constructed in his own and his companions' final days. Griffiths then reflects on some of the imaginative re-writings of that expedition. He particularly focuses on Roland Huntford's Scott and Amundsen (1979) and also mentions Douglas Stewart's The Fire on the Snow. Griffiths is interested in 'the latitude for legitimate historical imagination, the speculative space'.
1998 winner AQ Essay Competition
Last amended 29 Aug 2016 07:53:05
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