Kim Mahood Kim Mahood i(A66441 works by)
Born: Established: 1953 ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Kim Mahood is a writer and artist based in Wamboin near Canberra. She grew up in Central Australia and on Tanami Downs Station, and has maintained strong connections with the Warlpiri traditional owners of the station and with the families of the Walmajarri stockmen who worked with her family. She continues to spend several months each year in the Tanami and Great Sandy Desert region, working on cultural and environmental mapping projects with Aboriginal traditional owners.

(Source: Biography supplied by author.)

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Wandering with Intent Carlton North : Scribe , 2022 24823830 2022 selected work essay

'To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt — and to risk failure. For Kim Mahood, it is both a form of writing and an approach to life.

'In these finely observed and probing essays, award-winning artist and writer Kim Mahood invites us to accompany her on the road and into the remote places of Australia, where she is engaged in long-established collaborations of mapping, storytelling, and placemaking. Celebrated as one of the few Australian writers who both lives within and can articulate the complexities and tensions that arise in the spaces between Aboriginal and settler Australia, Mahood writes passionately and eloquently about the things that capture her senses and demand her attention — art, country, people, and writing. Her compelling evocation of desert landscapes and tender, wry observations of cross-cultural relationships describe people, places, and ways of living that are familiar to her but still strange to most non-Indigenous Australians.

'At once a testament to personal freedom and a powerful argument for Indigenous self-determination, Wandering with Intent demonstrates, with candour, humour, and hope, how necessary and precious it is for each of us to choose how to live.' (Publication summary)

2023 winner The Age Book of the Year Award Non-Fiction Prize
y separately published work icon Position Doubtful : Mapping Landscapes and Memories Brunswick : Scribe , 2016 9189112 2016 single work autobiography

'Imagine the document you have before you is not a book, but a map. It is well-used, creased, and folded, so that when you open it, no matter how carefully, something tears, and a line that is neither latitude nor longitude opens in the hidden geography of the place you are about to enter.

'For the past twenty years, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to roam the harsh and beautiful desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional landowners; the mining companies have arrived; and Indigenous art has flourished.

'By immersing herself in the life of a small community and its art centre, and in her ground-breaking mapping projects, Mahood has been seeking to understand her own place in the country she loves, and to find a bridge across the fault line between the profoundly disparate cultures that inhabit it.

'Position Doubtful is a meditation on that experience. Containing astonishing writing about art and landscape, it is a beautiful and intense exploration of memory and homecoming. Written with great energy, insight, and humour, Position Doubtful is a unique portrait of black-and-white relations in contemporary Australia.' (Publication summary)

2018 shortlisted Festival Awards for Literature (SA) Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature South Australian Literary Awards Award for Non-Fiction
2013 winner Australian Centre Literary Awards Peter Blazey Fellowship
2017 shortlisted Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award
2017 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards Non-Fiction Book Award
2017 longlisted CHASS Australia Prizes Australia Book Prize
2017 shortlisted National Biography Award
2017 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year
2017 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Award for Non-Fiction
The Accident 2013 single work short story
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 355 2013;
2013 shortlisted ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
Last amended 15 Nov 2021 11:38:47
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