Whitty, Julia 1958(?)-

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WHITTY, Julia 1958(?)-

PERSONAL: Born c. 1958.

ADDRESSES: Home—Sonoma County, CA. Agent— c/o Author Mail, Houghton Mifflin, 222 Berkeley St., Boston, MA 02116-3764.

CAREER: Writer and producer of nature documentaries.

AWARDS, HONORS: O. Henry Award, 1999; Bernice Slot award; Emmy Awards; CableACE awards; National Magazine Award finalist.

WRITINGS:

A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga (short stories), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2002.

Contributor of short stories and essays in periodicals, including Harper's, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Story, and Prairie Schooner. Writer and producer of nature documentaries, including Return of the Great Whales and In the Kingdom of the Dolphins.

SIDELIGHTS: Julia Whitty is a noted producer of television nature documentaries airing on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), National Geographic, and others, and which have won her coveted prizes. Her debut book, A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga, is a collection of short stories largely pertaining to human efforts to subdue the natural world. "The animals that inhabit her book are decidedly more noble than those who observe, domesticate and incarcerate them," commented Susan Sherman in a New York Times review. The book received universally positive reviews, although some stories are perceived as stronger and more believable than others.

The book is "short fiction with a long perspective," noted Michael Upchurch for the Seattle Times. The title story is based on fact: the giant tortoise, Tu'i Malia, was presented to the queen of Tonga by Captain James Cook in 1776. Tu'i Mali, in fact, lived until 1966. In the story, told from her perspective, Tu'i Mali articulates her loneliness as the only one of her kind on the island, her joy at being accepted into the royal family, and her agony as migratory whales and sea turtles are hunted to extinction. "The message here is about the havoc humankind has wrought on the natural world," wrote Upchurch. "But the story's imaginative energy springs from Whitty's ability to enter unfamiliar realms, whether Tongan or reptilian, and make them feel like the norm."

Although Upchurch felt that "Darwin in Heaven" lacks solid footing, a critic for Kirkus Reviews commented that this story, which chronicles Darwin's "ongoing research into the mystery of life once he's in heaven—and of his consultations there with, among others, Lao-tzu and Richard P. Feynman," is of equally fine quality to "The Tortoise."

In "Jimmy Underwater," the protagonist is an Antarctic ice-shelf researcher whose childhood near-death experience of being trapped under the ice of a Minnesota lake creates a fascination for that which almost killed him.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked that, while the entire work is of "mixed quality," A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga is "promising, elegant … [and] takes full advantage of the author's intimate perspective of the natural world."