Monday, May 13, 2013

An Open Swimmer by Tim Winton.

An Open Swimmer by Tim Winton.  Hardcover book published by George Allen & Unwin 1982, 173 pages.


I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but this Tim Winton guy wins a lot of awards.  It’s as if there aren’t any other contenders and they have to give all the money and acclaim to the one guy who keeps churning them out as there are no other horses in the race.  This may seem a bit unfair to Tim’s writing abilities, but seriously, if you check the interwebs you’ll see what I mean.  There are of course “other horses in the race” but Tim appears to be like a Black Caviar of current Australian writers… except of course he doesn’t win everything like Black Caviar did… and he isn’t a horse.  Still it’s an impressive haul of trophies that Tim has acquired and going by his sales in the second hand book trade, he’d be winning them a second time around if this was what awards were based upon.

An Open Swimmer was Tim Winton’s very first foray and if you look at the dust jacket you can see that even as early as this he was a winner.  The book was written when Tim was a young 21 and I guess it was a taste of things to come.  It was only three years after this that Tim won his first Miles Franklin Award for “Shallows” and he has won it three more times since then.  This particular copy of An Open Swimmer is a first edition which like some firsts of early titles by popular authors, is worth a bit of $$$.  There are a few other early Tim’s that are worth a bit as they are now slightly difficult to find unlike his later books which are quite easy to find secondhand.  When I picked this book up, I wasn’t 100% on the value, just 100% on the authors abilities to sell.  The fact that it does have some value was an added bonus. 

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