Nicolas Rothwell writes at the edges of things. He's twice won the Prime Minister's Literary Award — for both fiction and non-fiction — and his work slides between both registers: fiction brushes against fact, philosophy slips into story.

His latest novel, Yilkari: A Desert Suite, written with his wife, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, takes readers deep into the Western Desert, showing how Country makes art, how absence reveals, and how silence can heal.

Rothwell reflects on his autodidactic approach to art and on the tension between concealment and revelation in the work from the Western Desert.