Vale Brenda Walker

The author Brenda Walker has died.

Walker was the author of the novels Crush, One More River, Poe’s Cat and The Wing of Night. The latter won the 2006 Nita B Kibble Award for an established writer and the 2007 Asher Award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her memoir, Reading by Moonlight, won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Award for nonfiction and the 2011 Nita B Kibble Award.

Author Delia Falconer writes: 

Walker published her creative work while sustaining a demanding academic career, in which she also achieved significant academic publications, including editing books on gender and poetry and the writing of Elizabeth Jolley. She also edited and contributed to the anthology Risks, which drew together short fiction by major authors of the 1990s.

She is remembered as an inspirational teacher and supervisor of PhD research, with many published authors stating that they would not have begun their careers or found the courage to publish without her.

Former colleague Yasmin Haskell, UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations at Monash University, remembers Brenda as an ‘“esprit de finesse”, whose mind and conversation bubbled with curiosity about literature and art from Ireland to Italy, Russia to Japan’. ‘She cherished her friendships with colleagues from Classics, Italian, History, Fine Arts and Philosophy.’

Walker’s influence in building Australian writing with knowledge, skill and kindness extended beyond [Western Australia]. In addition to her work as a mentor for Varuna, she was a member of the Australia Council’s Literature Board from 2012 to 2014 and chair of the judging panel of the national Stella Prize for women’s writing from 2016–2017.

In the days since her death, I have heard from many writers who received generous letters of encouragement, unbidden, in a spirit of solidarity. One recipient described being in the same room as her at the many festivals to which she was invited, in Ubud (Bali), Cheltenham (UK) and Australia, as ‘magical’.

Yet Brenda’s readers may be unaware of the significant body of short work that she produced before and after her retirement as emeritus professor.

These stories and essays – which explore key preoccupations of risk, motherhood, and the steadying forces of family and music – appeared in one-off Australian collections like Carmel Bird’s Daughters and Fathers and international literary journals. The story The Houses that are Left Behind, in the journal Kenyon Review, won a prestigious O Henry Prize.

Fremantle Press publisher Georgia Richter writes:

It is with profound sadness that I and my colleagues at Fremantle Press acknowledge the untimely and sudden death of Brenda Walker, esteemed writer, Winthrop Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, past Stella Prize chair, and friend and mentor to many – a gentle, generous, considerate person and a writer of immense talent and deep insight.

In 2020, Brenda was one of the three external judges of the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, on the anniversary of thirty years since she herself won the inaugural Hungerford with her brilliant first novel, Crush (1991). Of her Hungerford win, Brenda said, ‘There is no better way for a Western Australian writer to make the transition from solitary work to the literary community and the world of readers’. Crush marked the beginning of a superlative writing career that saw Brenda become adored and admired nationally and beyond …

Many of our authors have told me across time that Brenda encouraged them in their writing or supervised their theses that we were now publishing, and how she was a friend, champion, exacting practitioner, canny therapist and gentle guide all at once. I had already learned, during my own masters, that Brenda did not ask for vulnerability without giving it in return – and that better, more genuine writing would always be the result.

Only once, recently, did Brenda refuse an invitation, and that was to come to the 2024 Hungerford ceremony to celebrate with alumni and to meet the new winner. She sent warm wishes and regrets, but was looking forward to a trip to Oslo with her beloved husband, Alex. This email exchange is my final correspondence with her and it is easier to think of her somewhere out in the world, filtering its richness and its beauty through her private wordscape, than that she should not be here anymore.

I know that in the Fremantle Press family – both in-house and our authors and collaborators – we who knew and loved her are mourning her passing. If there is supposed to be a pattern or a meaning in anything, it has felt terribly disrupted and broken this week. Brenda’s death makes no sense, and it reminds us that life is precious, too brief, and sometimes very unfair.

So it is that I am left thinking of all those accrued moments of warmth and generosity from one of the most lovely human beings I have ever known – the sum of many beautiful parts it is too early to be totalling.

Vale, Brenda. Thank you for all you did for us. The reach of your good deeds and beautiful words will continue far beyond a lifespan that has ended much too soon.