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Delia Falconer Delia Falconer i(A26842 works by) (a.k.a. Delia C. Falconer)
Born: Established: 1966 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Delia Falconer's prize-winning short stories have appeared in many publications, including The Age, Australian Love Stories, Picador New Writing, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories, and various editions of The Best Australian Essays and The Best Australian Stories. Her critical work appears in the Australian Literary Review, the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Age, and is regularly featured in international online digest sites such as 3 Quarks Daily and Arts and Letters Daily.

Her first novel, The Service of Clouds, was a critically acclaimed best-seller, and both it and her second novel, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers (republished in paperback as The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Selected Stories), were shortlisted for major Australian and international awards, including the Miles Franklin and Commonwealth Prize. She has won several awards, including the Independent's Young Writer of the Year Award (in 1992), first prize in the Island Essay Competition (in 1994), and the HQ/Joop! Short Story Competition.

Falconer has given writing workshops and taught creative writing at RMIT and worked as a lecturer in Creative Practice at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is also the editor of The Best Australian Stories (2008 and 2009), and The Penguin Book of the Road, an anthology of Australia's 'road writing'.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Cammeray : Simon and Schuster Australia , 2021 22597313 2021 selected work essay

'The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us – all the delicate networks that make us who we are – have already been transformed.

'In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.

'Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind?

'Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.' (Publication summary)

2022 winner Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature
The Opposite of Glamour 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , July 2017;

'Recently, I found myself longing to reread John Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez. I first read it when I was a teenager studying one of his novels at school; anxious for me to succeed, my parents purchased other Steinbeck books in the cheap Pan editions featuring naïve illustrations constrained by circular borders, as if seen through a telescope. The book is the author’s account, a decade after the event, of his travels in 1940 with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who would become the model for ‘Doc’ in Cannery Row.  Under the pretext of a loosely conceived scientific expedition, the men hire and equip a small purse seiner, a fishing boat, and set out from Monterey, in northern California, for the Sea of Cortez (also known as the Gulf of California), between the Baja California Peninsula and Mexico.  Over six weeks, they pull creatures from the low coastal waters, to collect specimens for Rickett’s marine biological business, but also for the sheer pleasure of gathering them in their plenitude and seeing how these small animals propel themselves and behave...' (Introduction)

2018 winner Walkley Award Walkley-Pascall Award for Arts Criticism
y separately published work icon Sydney Sydney : NewSouth Publishing , 2010 Z1729705 2010 single work prose (taught in 3 units) 'Sydney has always been the sexiest and most gaudy of our cities. In this book, the third in a series in which leading Australian authors write about their hometowns, novelist Delia Falconer conjures up its sandstone, humidity, and jacarandas. But she goes beyond these to find a far more complex city: beautiful, violent, half-wild, and at times deeply spiritual. It is a slightly unreal place, haunted by a past that it has never quite grasped, or come to terms with. Here, in her first non-fiction book, she proves herself an adept memoirist. She twines the stories of the people that have made Sydney the twenty-first century city it is today. Mad clergymen, amateur astronomers, Indigenous weather experts, crims and victims, photographers and artists: their stories are surprising, funny, and moving.' (From the publisher's website.)
2011 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's History Prize New South Wales History Prize New South Wales Community and Regional History Prize
2012 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
2012 shortlisted National Biography Award
2011 winner Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature
2011 co-winner 'The Nib': CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature The Alex Buzo Shortlist Prize
2010 shortlisted Colin Roderick Award
2011 shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award Non-Fiction Prize
2011 shortlisted Kibble Literary Awards Nita Kibble Literary Award
2011 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Non-Fiction
Last amended 25 Feb 2015 15:56:17
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