Creative writers and artists have important things to say to us not only as individuals but as a society. These writers and artists themselves are not best placed to explicate and discuss what these things are There is a real need for knowledgeable, sophisticated, popularising literary criticism. A discipline wholly disconnected from the public discourses of the society it is part of and that helps to sustain it, is a short-sighted and vulnerable one.
With Lyn McCredden Tim Winton has found his critical mate. It is hard to think of someone more capable of sympathetically explicating his literary and intellectual project. McCredden’s The Fiction of Tim Winton is a sensitive, engaged, learned and very careful, though still accessible, argument for the value of this project. It can be expected to remain the major work on Winton for many years and to stand as the starting point for discussions of what…