AustLit logo
NLA image of person
Gail Jones Gail Jones i(A26750 works by)
Born: Established: 1955 Harvey, Harvey area, Mandurah - Harvey area, Far Southwest Western Australia, Western Australia, ;
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

BiographyHistory

Gail Jones was educated at the University of Western Australia (UWA), later joining the staff as an Associate Professor in the English Department there. In 2001, she won The Australian University Teaching Award in the Humanities and the Arts category. After working at UWA, Jones took up a position as professor within the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. Her academic interests include gender and narrative theory, literary theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, creative writing, contemporary and Australian literature, and cinema studies.

Jones's short stories have appeared in numerous journals and have been highly praised for their linguistic richness and intellectual complexity, their subtle humour and intricate craftwork.

Jones has published seven novels to date (2018). Her structually complex debut novel Black Mirror was described by the judges of the Nita Kibble Literary Award as 'a witty interrogation of the problems faced by the biographer'. She followed this work with Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry, Five Bells, A Guide to Berlin, and the forthcoming The Death of Noah Glass. Between them, her novels have won the Colin Roderick Award, the Nita Kibble Award (twice), the Western Australian Premier's Book Award (twice), the South Australian Premier's Award, the Barbara Ramsden Award, and the T.A.G. Hungerford Award, and have been shortlisted and longlisted for national and international prizes including the Miles Franklin Award and the Booker Prize. She won the Philip Hodgins Award (for a consistently outstanding Australian writer) in 2011.

Exhibitions

17457043
17457043
17022329

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Salonika Burning Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2022 24962211 2022 single work novel historical fiction

'Greece, 1917. The great city of Salonika is engulfed by fire as all of Europe is ravaged by war.

'Amid the destruction, there are those who have come to the frontlines to heal: surgeons, ambulance drivers, nurses, orderlies and other volunteers. Four of these people—Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley—are at the centre of Gail Jones’s extraordinary new novel, which takes its inspiration from the wartime experiences of Australians Miles Franklin and Olive King, and British painters Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In Jones’s imagination these four lives intertwine and ramify, compelled by the desire to create something meaningful in the ruins of a broken world.

'Immersive and gripping, Salonika Burning illuminates not only the devastation of war but also the vast social upheaval of the times. It shows Gail Jones to be at the height of her powers.' (Publication summary)

2023 winner HNSA Historical Novel Prize Adult
2023 shortlisted Voss Literary Prize
2023 longlisted Colin Roderick Award
2023 longlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
2023 shortlisted APA Book Design Awards Best Designed Literary Fiction / Poetry Cover designed by W.H. Chong.
2023 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Fiction
y separately published work icon Our Shadows Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2020 19549463 2020 single work novel

'Our Shadows is a story about three generations of family living in Kalgoorlie, where gold was discovered in 1893 by an Irish-born prospector named Paddy Hannan, whose own history weaves in and out of this beguiling novel.

'Nell and Frances are sisters who are close enough in age to be mistaken for twins. Raised by their grandparents, they now live in Sydney. Each in her own way struggles with the loss of their parents.

'Little by little the sisters grow to understand the imaginative force of the past and the legacy of their shared orphanhood. Then Frances decides to make a journey home to the goldfields to explore what lies hidden and unspoken in their lives, in the shadowy tunnels of the past.' (Publication summary)

2021 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Fiction
2021 shortlisted Voss Literary Prize
2021 shortlisted HNSA Historical Novel Prize Adult
2021 longlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
y separately published work icon The Death of Noah Glass Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2018 11873096 2018 single work novel

'The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block. His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father’s death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. The police are investigating.

'None of it makes any sense. Martin sets off to Palermo in search of answers about his father’s activities, while Evie moves into Noah’s apartment, waiting to learn where her life might take her. Retracing their father’s steps in their own way, neither of his children can see the path ahead.

'Gail Jones’s mesmerising new novel tells a story about parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns that life makes. The Death of Noah Glass is about love and art, about grief and happiness, about memory and the mystery of time.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2020 winner Festival Awards for Literature (SA) Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature South Australian Literary Awards Award for Fiction
2019 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Fiction
2019 shortlisted Voss Literary Prize
2019 winner Prime Minister's Literary Awards Fiction
2019 shortlisted Colin Roderick Award
2019 longlisted Davitt Award Best Adult Crime Novel
2019 shortlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
2019 shortlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
2019 longlisted The Stella Prize
Last amended 10 Dec 2020 10:25:45
Other mentions of "" in AustLit:
    X