Rebecca Giggs

Rebecca Giggs is a Perth-based Australian nonfiction writer, known for Fathoms: The World in the Whale.

Career

Giggs studied at the University of Western Australia. She holds an LLB, BA Arts (Hons) and a PhD in ecological literary studies conferred in 2014.^[1]

Giggs is an honorary fellow at the Macquarie University in Sydney.^[2] She was awarded the 2017 Mick Dark flagship fellowship by Varuna for "The Whale in the Room", the working title for Fathoms.^[3] 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.^[4]

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".^[5]

Her first book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale, was published in 2020 worldwide by Scribe^[6] and by Simon & Schuster in the USA.^[7]

Awards and recognition

Kirkus Reviews named Fathoms in their "10 Top Summer Reads in Nonfiction"^[8] and described the book as "a thoughtful, ambitiously crafted appeal for the preservation of marine mammals".^[9] In November 2020 Giggs won the Nib Literary Award^[10] and in February 2021 she won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction for Fathoms.^[11] 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.^[12]

Year	Title	Award	Category	Result	Ref.
2020	Fathoms	Kirkus Prize	Nonfiction	Finalist	[13]
		Nib Literary Award	—	Won	[10]
		Western Australian Premier's Book Awards	Emerging Writer	Won	[14]
2021		Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence	Nonfiction	Won	[11]
		PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award	—	Shortlisted	[15]
		Stella Prize	—	Shortlisted	[16]
		Wainwright Prize	Global Conservation	Shortlisted	[12]
	"Soundings"	Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing	—	Shortlisted	[17][18]

Bibliography

Books

• —— (2020). Fathoms: The World in the Whale. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781982120696.

Reviews

• "What Lies Beneath" – review of Robert Macfarlane's Underland