Latest News
Ian's novel, The Devil's Eye, has been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award for 2009
Ian will be giving a talk to the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland on Tuesday 3 March at 7.30pm.
Ian will be appearing at the Perth Writers Festival on 28 February, 1 March and 2 March.
Ian will be speaking New Zealand author, Jenny Pattrick, about her novels The Denniston Rose and Catching the Current at Avid Reader bookshop in Brisbane's West End on Thursday 19 February 2009 at 6.00pm.
Ian will be launching his latest novel The Devil's Eye in Cairns on the 11th of December at 6pm at Apostrophe Books, on The Pier.
Affection longlisted for the 2007 Dublin IMPAC literary award
Affection shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book
Affection shortlisted for The Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Colin Roderick Award for the best Australian book of 2005.
Affection shortlisted for the 2005 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction at the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards.
Actor and author William McInnes interviewed in the Adelaide Advertiser: "I love cricket biographies. I love Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, American realists like John Steinbeck, Faulkner, not that he was a realist really. I like Hemingway. And I tell you what, I read Ian Townsend's book. Now that was fantastic. I really liked that book. Really graceful writing. Really interesting, too. A cracker."
Ian Townsend has been awarded the John Oxley Library Fellowship, to research his next novel, based on the 1899 Bathurst Bay cyclone.
Ian Townsend's radio documentary on male fertility (which won the 2005 Eureka Prize for Health and Medical Research Jounalism) was shortlisted for the 2005 Queensland Premiers Literary Award for Science Writing. This is Townsend's second Eureka prize for science writing.
Chapter 1
Ian Townsend is a journalist who has been reporting about Queensland's political and social issues for the best part of two decades.
Courtesy Fourth Estate
The Devil's Eye
The Devil's Eye, published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, is his second novel and it is another work of fiction based on true events.
On March the 4th, 1899, more than 100 schooners, luggers and cutters are gathered in the calm of Bathurst Bay, under the lee of Cape Melville, to celebrate the end of the working week and a day off.
Out to sea, an intense cyclone named Mahina was speeding towards them - the deadliest and most intense storm in recorded Australian history.
The Devil's Eye is based on the true events of what became known as the pearling disaster of 1899.
Ian's first novel Affection is set in 1900 and based on a true story of what happened when bubonic plague came to Australia, and how a few doctors tried to stop it.