Scott was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1957 and is the eldest of four siblings with a white mother and an Aboriginal father.
Scott has written five novels and a children's book, and has had poetry and short stories published in a range of anthologies. He began writing shortly after becoming a secondary school teacher of English. His teaching experience included working in urban, rural Australia and in Portugal. He spent some time teaching at an Aboriginal community in the north of Western Australia, where he started to research his family's history.[2]
His first novel, True Country, was published in 1993 with an edition published in a French translation in 2005. His second novel, Benang, won the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards 1999, the Miles Franklin Award 2000, and the Kate Challis RAKA Award 2001. Both novels were influenced by his research and seemed to be semi-autobiographical. The themes of these novels have been said to "explore the problem of self-identity faced by light-skinned Aboriginal people and examine the government's assimilationist policies during the first decades of the twentieth century".[2]
Scott was the first indigenous writer to win the Miles Franklin Award for Benang, which has since been published in translation in France and the Netherlands. His book, Kayang and Me, was written in collaboration with Noongar elder Hazel Brown, his aunt,[2] and was published in May 2005. The work is a monumental oral-based history of the author's family, the south coast Noongar people of Western Australia.[3]
His 2010 novel That Deadman Dance (Picador) explores the lively fascination felt between Noongar, British colonists and American whalers in the early years of the 19th century. On 21 June 2011, it was announced that Scott had won the 2011 Miles Franklin Award for this novel. Scott also won the 2011 Victorian Premier's Prize for the same novel.[4]
"An Intimate Act" in Summer Shorts by Peter Holland (Fremantle Press, 1993)
"Registering Romance" in Summer Shorts 3 : Stories – Poems – Articles – Images by Bill Warnock, et al., (Fremantle Press, 1995)
"Into the Light (after Hans Heysen's painting of the same name)" in Those Who Remain Will Always Remember : An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing by Anne Brewster, et al., (Fremantle Press, 2000)
"Damaged but Persistent" in Siglo no.12 Summer (2000)
"Capture", in Southerly (pp. 24–33), vol.62 no.2 (2002)
