AustLit

Vivienne Cleven was born in 1968 in Surat, Queensland and grew up in western Queensland, homeland of her Aboriginal heritage. She left school at thirteen to work with her father as a jillaroo: building fences, mustering cattle, and working at various jobs on stations throughout Queensland and New South Wales.

Cleven won the David Unaipon Award for unpublished Aboriginal writing with her first novel Bitin' Back in 2000. In 2006, she won the Kate Challis RAKA Award for both Bitin' Back and her later novel, Her Sister's Eye; the latter also won the Prize for Indigenous Writing (Victorian Premier's Literary Awards). Her writing appears in anthologies including Fresh Cuttings: A Celebration of Fiction and Poetry From UQP's Black Writing Series (2003) and Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008). In 2005, she adapted Bitin' Back for the stage. Her play appears in the anthology Contemporary Indigenous Plays, which she co-edited with Larissa Behrendt in 2007. In 2024, her novel Bitin' Back was featured in UQP's First Nations Classics series, with an introduction from Melissa Lucashenko.

For her manuscript Beautiful Monsters, she won the Magabala Fellowship in 2022 and received the Mascara Varuna Writers' and Editors' Residency in 2023. In 2024, she received a $10,000 grant from the Elevate: First Nations Storytelling and Literature Fund.