Tara June Winch

Tara June Winch is an Australian author of Wiradjuri, Afghan, and English heritage. Her novel The Yield (2020) won the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and the Prime Minister's Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Yield is a profound meditation on language, dispossession, and survival, structured around a fictional Wiradjuri dictionary. The novel follows August Gondiwindi, who returns to Australia for her grandfather's funeral and discovers his manuscript — a dictionary of Wiradjuri words — which forms the moral and spiritual heart of the book. The Yield is widely regarded as one of the most important Australian novels of recent decades for its linguistic recovery project and its political urgency. Winch's debut novel Swallow the Air (2006), published when she was 22, was also critically acclaimed. She has lived in France for extended periods and is considered one of Australia's most significant contemporary writers.