Arabic version: «كلاودستريت» تتصدر قائمة راديو ناشيونال للكتب الأسترالية

According to ABC News, Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet has been named number one in ABC Radio National’s Top 100 Australian Books after more than 280,000 votes were counted. Three other Winton novels also made the list: Breath (2008) at 33, Dirt Music (2001) at 41 and Juice (2024) at 88.

Winton completed the last lines of Cloudstreet on the Greek island of Hydra, following a European residency that took his family to Paris and rural Ireland. After returning to Western Australia in 1988, he edited the manuscript while growing vegetables and fishing. The novel was published in 1991 during a recession, when interest rates were 17.5 per cent. Publishers Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble chose a paperback edition to make it more affordable.

The book was an immediate success, Winton said, and has never been out of print. Thirty-five years later, it has been adapted for radio, theatre, opera and television, and translated into many languages. The novel follows the Lamb and Pickles families over two decades in mid-20th-century Perth and won Winton his second Miles Franklin Literary Award. He has won the award four times, including for Dirt Music in 2002 and Breath in 2009.

Dedicated to Winton’s grandparents, Cloudstreet drew on stories he heard during family lunches and on aspects of his family history. Oriel Lamb, the novel’s industrious matriarch, was modelled on his paternal grandmother, Olive. Winton has described the book as an attempt to honour a fading oral storytelling tradition in white working-class culture.

Much of the novel unfolds around Derbal Yerrigan, known as the Swan River. Winton said the river was the book’s abiding metaphor and hoped it could help drive reconciliation. He said the characters reflect a disconnect between White Australia and the land’s traditional owners, while also portraying working-class lives, hardships and aspirations.