by David Malouf
Born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1934, he left Australia aged twenty-four and lived in Britain from 1959-68 where he taught in London and Birkenhead. He returned to Australia in 1968 and lectured at the University of Sydney. He became a full-time writer in 1978 and now lives in Sydney. His first two published books were both collections of poetry: Bicycle and Other Poems (1970) and Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems (1974). He later published another collection of poems Revolving Days (2008). He is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including An Imaginary Life (1978), The Great World (1990) winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize and the Prix Femina Etranger, Remembering Babylon (1993), shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) and Ransom (2009), and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street (1985). He has published three collections of short-stories Antipodes (1985), Dream Stuff (2000) and Every Move You Make (2006). He also wrote the libretti for Voss, an adaptation of the novel by Patrick White and first produced in Sydney in 1986, and Baa Baa Black Sheep, an opera with music by Michael Berkeley, the play Blood Relations (1988), and his latest collaboration with Michael Berkeley is the opera Jane Eyre (2000). He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000 and the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008.
