Tim Winton is not one to get carried away with awards, even when his most famous novel is voted Australia’s favourite book.
The Western Australian author will take the stage in Hobart tonight, after Cloudstreet topped the ABC’s Top 100 Australian Books list with more than 280,000 votes counted.
The author of 32 books said the recognition meant less to him than knowing readers still connected with the novel 35 years after its publication.
“It’s nice when people like your books. It’s nice when they read them and it’s nice when they don’t forget them,” Winton told Pulse earlier this week.
The 1991 novel is older than one of his children and he said it was “kind of nice” that it still held a place in people’s hearts.
But Winton is wary of putting too much stock in accolades, saying the real satisfaction of writing comes from the work itself and the connections it creates.
“The prizes don’t mean anything. You know that they’re meaningless when you lose them and they’re meaningless when you win them,” he said.
What mattered instead, he said, were the heartfelt letters from readers around the world.
“You can see that you’ve affected a person deeply enough to … write something on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it and take it down the post office and send it across the world,” he said.
“That’s a nice thing, that you’ve made a connection with a stranger. And that’s the great thing about art, you know? That you touch people that you’ll never meet.”
Winton said he had no favourite among his books, but he looked back fondly on Cloudstreet for more practical reasons.
“We were so broke just before it was published and the fact that it dug us out of a hole has always made me fond towards it,” he said.
Winton will appear in conversation with Gardening Australia presenter Hannah Moloney at Hobart’s Theatre Royal at 6pm tonight, in an event presented by Fullers Bookshop.
His visit comes as he releases Songs from the Firefront, a collection of reflections on his stage of life and the wider challenges facing the world.
“You get to my age and you realise there’s more days behind you than ahead of you and that concentrates the mind somewhat,” he said.
His mother died last year and his father is 95, while his six grandchildren have him thinking about the world they will inherit.
“I’m looking at these six grandkids and reading the future in their faces and knowing that the future world will be written on their faces,” he said.
Winton, who has been writing since he was 19, said it had not become any easier with experience.
“You keep telling yourself you’re a writer, but you’re only as good as what you can write,” he said.
Every book was “very, very different” and came with its own terms and conditions, he said.
“You just gotta wrestle it down as best you can.”
He also had praise for Tasmania’s literary reputation, describing his friend and fellow author Richard Flanagan as the “patron saint of the Apple Isle”.
Winton said Tasmania and regional Western Australia had produced some of the country’s strongest literary voices because writers outside the major centres had to work harder to be heard.
“I think we write best from the margins,” he said.
“We have to hurl ourselves from the edge to the centre. We have to work that bit harder.”
