
Biggs’s reflections on life after love are penetrating to the bone. She handles the bereaved one’s paradox of grief-and-relief beautifully. She does so in a way that is also slightly shocking in its truth. And then there are the open glades of lightness. This is not a self-help text in griefology
— Peter Sutton, anthropologist, author of Politics of Suffering.
About Shards of Ice
Minnie Biggs’ moving memoir, Shards of Ice, revolves around the four years of her husband’s decline and death, her deep grief and eventual return to herself. Written in snapshots, rather than a linear history, the story interweaves experiences of the author’s trips to Antarctica and the Red Desert in central Australia; both places of spiritual significance to her.
A story of profound healing found through the acts of of travel and writing, Shards of Ice provides pathways and experience for navigating the difficult questions of life, death, growing older and life after love.
About Minnie Biggs
Minnie Biggs was born in New York, lives in Kurrajong NSW, visits Sydney frequently and is a meditator. She has written about food for the prize winning Simple Cooking magazine, essays on spirituality for yoga and monastic journals, music reviews for newspapers, and poems in Haiku books. Shards of Ice is her first memoir.
About Winton Higgins
Winton Higgins is a Sydney writer and senior academic. After an initial career in law, he has spent the rest of his working life as an academic in social science and history, at Macquarie University, then the University of Technology Sydney, where he is currently a visiting research fellow. He has a long list of academic publications, including the recent Politics against pessimism: Social democratic possibilities since Ernst Wigforss (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2013), co-authored with Geoff Dow. His most recent published work, co-authored with Professor Colin Tatz, is the reference book, The magnitude of genocide (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016) which came out in the USA in March this year.
In the last 16 years he has also turned to creative writing. In 2002 he won the NSW Writers’ Centre’s short short story competition. In 2003 his travel diary, Journey into darkness (Blackheath, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger), was released. Winton is an alumni of the first Writing Master Class with Tom Keneally held in 2014.