Cirrus@Austlit

The youngest of three siblings, Brenda Walker was born in Grafton in 1957. She moved to Armidale as a young girl where she would complete her undergraduate studies at the University of New England. She was the daughter of Shirley Walker and the sister of Don Walker. Walker’s childhood and upbringing was characterised by stories of young rural men lost on the battlefield of the Second World War and the woman who waited for them. 

Walker earned her PhD on Samuel Beckett’s fiction at the Australian National University of Canberra. In 1984 she relocated to Perth to take up a lectureship at the University of Western Australia. Walker became the first female professor in the history of the department when she became the Winthrop Chair of English Literature and Cultural Studies. 

Walker published her first novel in 1991, published by Fremantle Press Crush is a story of ‘everyday life’ and relationships set in Perth in the late eighties. An experimental crime novel, Crush won the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award and was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Fiction. 

In 1993 Walker published One More River which earned Walker a second shortlisted entry for the Western Australia Premier’s Award for Fiction. Poe's Cat followed in 1999, a story of Australian cousins told against Edgar Allan Poe’s marriage to his 13 year old cousin, an attempt by Walker to “put the love back into Poe” and a continuation of her exploration of gender and writing. Poe’s Cat was shortlisted for three Australian literary awards - the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Poetry, the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Fiction and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.

The Wing of Night drew on Walker’s own childhood experiences of rural life, World Wars, The Gulf War and Western Australian women at home. Walker was awarded an Asher Award for its anti-war theme and it was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. 

Walker’s memoir Reading by Moonlight : How Books Saved a Life details ‘how books save a life’ throughout Walker’s treatment and recovery from Breast Cancer. She told an interviewer that ‘I thought this may be my last book but I seem to have survived.’ Reading by Moonlight was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Nita B. Kibble Award.

As well as her creative writing, Walker produced a significant body of short work that included stories and essays concerning her research areas of gender studies, Australian literature, late modernism, and climate change.