Waiting for the new wave | Review | guardian.co.uk Books

Tim Winton feature

He wrote 10 books in the 1980s, and it is striking how he still sees writing as both a pleasure and an economic necessity; for all his talk about bobbing in the surf, he hasn't got a lot of truck with artistic pretension. Failing to finish a book means having to "make up the income some other way", and in his 20s and 30s that simply wasn't an option. He had three desks, he once said, because "I couldn't afford to get stuck and give a project a week or two of mechanical diagnostics. So I'd have a kids' thing" - he's written six children's books - "a short story and a fiction thing [on the go], or two fiction things and a kids' thing and it was 'right, not working', just slide the chair over and go 'where was I?'"...