Background

Tim Richards was born in 1960 in Australia.

Education

Tim was educated at Hampton High School. He received a degree from Melbourne University and studied at the Australian Film Radio and Television School.

Career

Richards's first published fiction appeared in Wisden Cricket Monthly in 1979. After leaving film school in 1989, he wrote sketch comedy as a staff writer on all eight series of Fast Forward and three series of Full Frontal. Two series of surreal football stories, Endgames, appeared in the Melbourne Age in 1997-1998. Some of Tim's short stories have also appeared in the Age, Meanjin, Overland, Heat, The Sleepers Almanac, and The Best Australian Stories.

Tim Richards's autobiographical trilogy, Approximate Life, was published in three volumes by Allen and Unwin: Letters to Francesca, The Prince, and Duckness. Though 'peeved by publishers' current distaste for story collections', Richards has continued to concentrate on that medium, and the bulk of his stories are best described as 'bizarre autobiographical fantasies', or 'autobiographical expressionism'.

Richards was script-editor on the feature Looking for Alibrandi, and he has worked as a script consultant, mainly for the New South Wales Film and Television Office. Richards also co-wrote with Don Kaltenbach Prostate Cancer: A Survivor's Guide in 1993.

In 2011 Black Inc published a collection of short stories by Richards, titled Thought Crimes, that peers into the future with more dark humor. One of the stories has since been optioned for screen production by the film director John Michael McDonagh.

Achievements

• Tim Richards is a prolific short stories writer. His best known work is a novella The Prince, which was published in 1997.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The prince 1997
  • Duckness 1998
  • Letters to Francesca 1996

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2008