[2] She received a Varuna Writer's House Fellowship for her first novel, The Daughters of Moab, published in 2008 and shortlisted for an Aurealis Award.
It has been reviewed as "a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale"[6] with a "brilliantly evoked atmosphere of secrecy and threat"[7] carried by a "strong, empathetic central character [and] fast paced narrative".
[8] Westwood developed her distinctive visual sensibility while working as a theatre performer and deviser.
Darkly poetic, her stories are underscored by feminist and gender politics, and have a preoccupation with humanity's capacity for destruction and equal instinct for survival.
[9] By example, The Daughters of Moab has been reviewed as "a richly peopled canvas, of which perhaps the real star is the landscape, so intensely depicted as to be almost a presence".