Rebecca Giggs
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Rebecca Giggs is a London-based Australian nonfiction writer, known for Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
Giggs was born in the UK and moved to Western Australia at an early age[1]. She studied at the University of Western Australia. She holds an LLB, BA Arts (Hons) and a PhD in ecological literary studies conferred in 2014.[2]
Giggs is an honorary fellow at the Macquarie University in Sydney.[3] She was awarded the 2017 Mick Dark flagship fellowship by Varuna for "The Whale in the Room", the working title for Fathoms.[4] She won support from Writers Victoria through the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund to visit the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany as a writing fellow in 2018.[5]
As an essayist, Giggs has contributed to The Atlantic on science subjects from "Why We're Afraid of Bats" to "Human Drugs Are Polluting the Water—And Animals Are Swimming in It".[6]
Her first book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale, was published in 2020 worldwide by Scribe[7] and by Simon & Schuster in the USA.[8]
Awards and recognition
Kirkus Reviews named Fathoms in their "10 Top Summer Reads in Nonfiction"[9] and described the book as "a thoughtful, ambitiously crafted appeal for the preservation of marine mammals".[10] In November 2020 Giggs won the Nib Literary Award[11] and in February 2021 she won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction for Fathoms.[12] In 2021, Fathoms was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, alongside David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet and others, in the Global Conservation Writing category.[13]
| Year | Title | Award | Category | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Fathoms | Kirkus Prize | Nonfiction | Finalist | [14] |
| Nib Literary Award | — | Won | [11] | ||
| Western Australian Premier's Book Awards | Emerging Writer | Won | [15] | ||
| 2021 | Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence | Nonfiction | Won | [12] | |
| PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award | — | Shortlisted | [16] | ||
| Stella Prize | — | Shortlisted | [17] | ||
| Wainwright Prize | Global Conservation | Shortlisted | [13] | ||
| "Soundings" | Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing | — | Shortlisted | [18][19] |
