Antoni Jach

Margaret was descended on her mother's side from the Clancys of Castletownroche in Ireland and her forebears on her mother's side arrived in Melbourne on 4 November 1841.

It is claimed that Margaret's grandfather, Thomas Gerald Clancy, was the basis for Banjo Paterson's poems 'Clancy of the Overflow' and 'The Man from Snowy River'.

Władysław’s father was the mayor of the village of Skronina and Władysław, according to his memoir, spent most of World War II in a Nazi concentration camp.

Antoni Jach (born 8 May 1956) is an Australian novelist, painter and playwright.

His most recent novel is Travelling Companions, a novel about friendship, travel and storytelling.

His previous novels are The Weekly Card Game, a tragicomic study of quotidian repetition and The Layers of the City, a meditation on contemporary Paris, civilisation and barbarism (which was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Fiction Award and was translated into Turkish under the title Sehrin Katmanlari).

, and Napoleon's Double, a narrative enlisting history and philosophy for its own neo-baroque ends.

Antoni is also the author of a book of poetry, An Erratic History, an idiosyncratic history of Australia and two plays, Miss Furr and Miss Skeene and Waiting for Isabella.

He is the creator of two artist books and his paintings have been on display in an exhibition at Le Globo in Paris.

He has a painting featured on the cover of Antipodes, the literary journal of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies

Antoni was born in Melbourne to a Polish father Władysław Jach (the author of a book of poetry Most Human Beings are Dreamers and of a memoir Walk in a Wind) and an Australian mother, Margaret Jach (née Taylor).

He began teaching at RMIT in 1986 where he taught until 2011.

He is married to the novelist Sallie Muirden, with whom he has two children, Hayley and Oliver.

His novels are modernist in style and his interest in Europe, particularly France and its intellectuals, has inspired Napoleon's Double and his exploration of Paris in The Layers of the City.

He has interviewed many writers including, including Salman Rushdie, Joseph Heller and the art-historian and poet TJ Clark

Antoni, together with Anne Richter, established the renowned Professional Writing and Editing course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1988.

He taught in that course initially, while later he taught in a Masters by coursework creative writing course and supervised MA and PhD by research candidates at RMIT.

Stephen Grimwade, a former Melbourne Writers Festival Director and ex-student of Antoni's sums up many students' feelings when he explains that Antoni changed his life.

Stephen has also been quoted as saying that Antoni was "open to students' ideas rather than just telling us what to think".

Antoni's first unpublished novel Dina Club was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1990.

He completed a BA in English and Art History at La Trobe University.

He also holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne.

His PhD dissertation was on the role of the visual image in W.G. Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz.

Antoni started teaching a series of novel-writing masterclasses to published and experienced writers in January of 2009 and after leaving RMIT in 2011 he started his own business teaching masterclasses, which were mainly taught in the Board Room of the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.

The Weekly Card Game is a tour de force.

Trying to entertain using the subject of boredom is a risky challenge few writers would dare take up in an increasingly market-oriented publishing industry.

The comic effect is mainly achieved through a terse but very stylish prose sprinkled with deadpan humour, the action being revealed through the eyes of a self-effacing focaliser.

Napoleon's Double is an intellectual treat of an unusual kind, at once indulgent, slow-moving, engrossing.

It is seen as the high point of Jach's career.

The two most striking extended passages in the book emulate the kind of probing by naive inquiry found in the work of Jean-Antoine's hero, Voltaire.

Three of the companions are sent as spies to the Egyptian town of El Arish.

Posing as Italian surgeons, their ostensible mission is to cure a reclusive prince of an undiagnosed illness: "He wishes to escape the intertwined ropes of melancholy and lethargy."

The discussion about how he can be "cured of life itself" is virtuosic.

The self-proclaimed servants of knowledge and "the empirical world" will still find that mesmerism and magnetism do the trick.