David Malouf

His paternal family had immigrated from Lebanon in the 1880s, while his mother's family had moved to England via the Netherlands, before migrating to Australia in 1913.

David George Joseph Malouf (born 20 March 1934) is an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright and librettist.

He attended Brisbane Grammar School and graduated from the University of Queensland with a B.A. degree in 1955.

He lectured for a short period before moving to London, where he taught at Holland Park School, before relocating to Birkenhead in 1962.

His first work appeared in 1962, as part of a book he shared with three more Australian poets.

He returned to Australia in 1968, taught at his old school, and lectured in English at the Universities of Queensland and Sydney.

Malouf identifies as gay.

He has lived in England and Tuscany, and for the past three decades spent most of his time in Sydney.

Though he would later become known abroad for his prose works, Malouf initially concentrated on poetry.

Malouf's 1974 collection Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

His collection Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems (1974) features childhood memories, his mother, his sister, travelling in Europe and war.

Malouf's first novel, Johnno (1975), is the semi-autobiographical tale of a young man growing up in Brisbane during the Second World War.

Johnno engages in shoplifting and goes to brothels, which contrasts with his friend Dante's middle-class conservatism.

Malouf began writing full-time in 1977.

An Imaginary Life (1978) is about the final years of Ovid.

Malouf's 1982 novella about three acquaintances and their experience of the First World War was titled Fly Away Peter.

Malouf published his memoir, titled 12 Edmondstone Street, in 1985.

Malouf has also written libretti for three operas (including Voss, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Patrick White and first produced in the 1986 Adelaide Festival of Arts conducted by Stuart Challender), and Baa Baa Black Sheep (with music by Michael Berkeley), which combines a semi-autobiographical story by Rudyard Kipling with Kipling's Jungle Books.

Malouf has written several collections of short stories, and a play, Blood Relations (1988).

His 1990 novel The Great World won numerous awards, including the 1991 Miles Franklin Award and Prix Femina Étranger His 1993 novel Remembering Babylon was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 1994 Prix Femina Étranger, the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the 1995 Prix Baudelaire and the 1996 International Dublin Literary Award.

His epic novel The Great World (1990) tells the story of two Australians and their relationship amid the turmoil of two World Wars, including imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II.

1992 brought the publication of Poems, 1959–1989.

His Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Remembering Babylon (1993) is set in northern Australia during the 1850s amid a community of English immigrant farmers (with one Scottish family) whose isolated existence is threatened by the arrival of a stranger, a young white man raised from boyhood by Indigenous Australians.

He also delivered the 1998 Boyer Lectures.

Malouf delivered the 1998 Boyer Lectures on ABC Radio.

Malouf's work tends to be set in Australia, though "a European sensibility" is also present.

His writing is characterised by a heightened sense of spatial relations, from the physical environments into which he takes his readers—whether within or outside built spaces, or in a natural landscape.

He has likened each of his succession of novels to the discovery and exploration of a new room in a house, rather than part of an overarching development.

"At a certain point, you begin to see what the connections are between things, and you begin to know what space it is you are exploring."

From his first novel Johnno onwards, his themes focused on "male identity and soul-searching".

He said that much of the male writing that preceded him "was about the world of action. I don't think that was ever an accurate description of men's lives".

Malouf was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, the Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008 and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2016.

He has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Malouf was born in Brisbane, Australia, to a Christian Lebanese father and an English-born mother of Portuguese Sephardi Jewish descent.

La Boite Theatre adapted it for stage in 2006.

Australian critic Peter Craven described Malouf's 2007 short-story collection Every Move You Make as "as formidable and bewitching a collection of stories as you would be likely to find anywhere in the English-speaking world".

Craven went on to state that "No one else in this country has: the maintenance of tone, the expertness of prose, the easeful transition between lyrical and realist effects. The man is a master, a superb writer, and also (which is not the same thing) a completely sophisticated literary gent".

The Complete Stories appeared in 2007.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008, Malouf has lectured at both the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney.

Some of his poetry was also collected in Revolving Days: Selected Poems (2008), which is divided into four sections: on childhood, then Europe, then relocating to Sydney, then travelling between Europe and Australia.