Gail Jones is an Australian novelist and academic.
Contents
Early life and career
Gail Jones was born in Harvey, Western Australia. She grew up in Broome and Kalgoorlie. She studied fine arts briefly at the University of Melbourne before returning to Western Australia where she took her undergraduate degree and PhD from the University of Western Australia in 1994. Her thesis was titled Mimesis and alterity: postcolonialism, ethnography and the representation of racial 'others'. She is currently Professor of Writing in the Writing and Society Research School at the Western Sydney University.
Jones has also contributed content for an art exhibition, The floating world by Jo Darbyshire (2009).
Since 2017 Jones has been involved in a research project Other Worlds: Forms of 'World Literature', for which she is leading a theme titled 'Form as Encounter' that is exploring intercultural intersections and encounters.
Personal life
Jones has a daughter, Kyra Giorgi, who is also a writer.
Awards
Jones was presented with the Lifetime Achievement in Literature Award by Creative Australia in 2024.
The House of Breathing
T. A.G. Hungerford Award for an unpublished work of Fiction by a Western Australian Writer, 1991
Barbara Ramsden Award Book of the Year, 1992
Queensland Premier's Literary Awards Steele Rudd Award, 1993
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction winner 1993
Fetish Lives
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction joint-winner and Premier's Prize joint-winner 1997
Black Mirror
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction winner 2002
Shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award 2003
Shortlisted The Courier-Mail Book of the Year 2003
Longlist International Dublin Literary Award 2003
Nita Kibble Literary Award, 2003
Sixty Lights
Longlist Booker Prize 2004
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction winner 2004
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Overall Prize 2004
Published works
Novels
Black Mirror (2002)
Sixty Lights (2004)
Dreams of Speaking (2006)
Sorry (2007)
Five Bells (2011)
A Guide to Berlin (2015)
The Death of Noah Glass (2018)
Our Shadows (2020)
Salonika Burning (2022)
One Another (2024)
The Name of the Sister (2025)
Short story collections
The House of Breathing (1992)
Fetish Lives (1997)
Critical works
Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture Gail Jones, 'A Dreaming, a Sauntering: re-imagining critical paradigms' JASAL 5 (2006)
The Piano (Australian Screen Classics), Currency Press (2007)
These works have been widely translated. The languages include Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Mandarin, Polish, Croatian and Czech.