Women I Know

Unpicking the stitches of gender and genre, the stories in this searing, funny, haunting debut explore how our ideas of womanhood shape us, and what they cost us.

Winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Award, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
SMH Best Young Australian Novelist of 2023
Highly commended, 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award
 

‘My God darling—the women I know.’

A young woman tries to cheat her algorithm, creating a wholesome online persona while her ‘real’ life dissipates. A grandmother speaks to her granddaughter through the fog of generations. Two lovers divide over alternative meat options. A factory worker fits eyes in companion dolls until she is called on to install her own.

The women I know are sharp, absurd, sly, wrong, wry, repressed, hungry, horny, bold, envious, dominating, uncertain, overdetermined, underpaid, bored, smart, crystalizing, themselves.
 
A burning talent with growing international recognition, Katerina Gibson’s work has appeared in Granta, Kill Your Darlings, Overland and elsewhere. She is the Pacific regional winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and recipient of the Felix Meyer Scholarship.

‘Smart, gleeful, savage, funny and genuinely brilliant. I kept wanting to cry out with joy! Katerina Gibson is a superstar.’ Miles Allinson, author of In Moonland and Fever of Animals

‘[These stories] demonstrate an intellectual and imaginative power in their fearless probing into corners of the human world we didn’t even think existed until now. ... an author prepared to question and disrupt everything. This is an assured collection, audacious, dark, comic, and full of surprises – it demands to be reread, several times.’ Debra Adelaide, ABR

'Women I Know is a rich, contemporary blend of inventive and entertaining writing. Dark and funny, Katerina Gibson’s stories are sparkling with ideas – it’s thrilling that the future of Australian fiction is held in such talented hands.' Ben Walter, author of What Fear Was 

'Come for the bold conceits, stay for the savage disaffection. These mind-bending stories startle, surprise, beguile and devastate. Gibson’s talent, in striking out from the shores of realism, is to bring us closer to the truths of contemporary life.' Jo Lennan, author of In the Time of Foxes

‘[T]he pieces in Gibson’s fiction debut create an elegant and subtle whole, with delicate prose that moves the reader as expertly as it disturbs them.’ Georgia Brough, Books+Publishing

‘Katerina Gibson is a serious writer whose talent is going to envelop the whole world--you heard it here first. Reading this book made me genuinely excited and genuinely appalled by the depth of Gibson's promise.' Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries

“'Smart, gleeful, savage, funny and genuinely brilliant. I kept wanting to cry out with joy! Katerina Gibson is a superstar.'”

A solitary camper at a beach observes the families playing in the surf; a lonely woman laments her fractured relationship with her reclusive teenage son; a young marine biologist privately hired by a wealthy woman comes to realise her strange new position is as murky as the oceans she studies. These stories and more comprise Women I Know, the debut collection from prize-winning short fiction writer Katerina Gibson. In Women I Know Gibson expertly blends genre-bending plots with complex undercurrents of feeling and reflection. One of the book's most startling, chilling and evocative stories, 'Constellation in the Left Eye', follows a young woman who paints the eyeballs of life-size dolls and one day realises she is painting her own reproduction-an unsettling premise which beautifully and subtly explores the male gaze. Indeed, the thread that connects the protagonists of these vastly different stories is the lived experiences shared by all women, complicated and disturbing as they often are. Read together, the pieces in Gibson's fiction debut create an elegant and subtle whole, with delicate prose that moves the reader as expertly as it disturbs them. Readers of Krissy Kneen and Josephine Rowe will find Women I Know an engaging and nuanced collection. Georgia Brough is a teacher, critic and writer.

Katerina Gibson was born in 1994. She is a writer and a bookseller living in Naarm. Her stories have appeared in Granta, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Island Online, Going Down Swinging, the Meanjin blog andKill Your Darlings'New Australian Fiction 2020 anthology. Her short story 'Fertile Soil' was the Pacific regional winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Katerina is a 2021 Felix Meyer Scholar and a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist 2023. Her short story collection Women I Know won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2023.

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