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Tom Flood Tom Flood i(A505 works by)
Born: Established: 1955 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

Tom Flood, the son of writer Dorothy Hewett, was born in Sydney and grew up in Western Australia. After attending university for a time, he worked at a variety of jobs, including wheat sampler, geologist's assistant, tuna fisherman, ore sample pulveriser, bus conductor and musician.

Turning to fiction-writing in 1985, Flood won the 1988 Australian/Vogel Award with his first novel Oceana Fine. Set in Western Australia's wheat-belt, the novel explores the violent family history of Rex Cleaver against the background of a sea of wheat and the lives of wheat men.

Since 1988 Flood has worked on a second novel, Septimus Grout: an extract from this work was published in Southerly, but as at 2016, the novel itself has not been published. He also published a number of short stories.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

The Old Trails 2001 single work short story
2001 winner Banjo Paterson Writing Awards Prose
y separately published work icon Oceana Fine North Sydney : Allen and Unwin , 1989 Z120844 1989 single work novel

'Beneath a vast constructed/deconstructed landscape (both human and geographic) lies a labyrinth of disused mineshafts. It is a landscape in which vast saline lakes suddenly appear overnight, in which wheat babies disappear into wheat fields, in which lizards are mistaken for rocks, in which a huge grain silo becomes a cathedral and a gold front-end loader the angel of the apocalypse. It is a place where history repeats/mirrors itself and is populated by doppelganagers and we find ourselves following the after-image of the phosphene as though it was a manuscript hoping for illumination.

'The book deals with multiplicity of perception - through history/memory, national mythologies, families and writing (blood and ink), puzzles and their reasons - which might be said to be their execution.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1988 winner The Australian / Vogel National Literary Award (for an unpublished manuscript)
1990 winner Victorian Premier's Literary Awards The Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
1990 winner Miles Franklin Literary Award
Last amended 21 Nov 2016 13:22:54
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