David Malouf

Brief Biography

David Malouf was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1934. His father's family came to Australia in the 1880s from Lebanon and his mother's family from London just before World War I. He was educated at Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland, where he taught for two years after graduating. He left Australia aged twenty-four and lived in Britain from 1959-68 where he taught in London and Birkenhead. He returned to teach English at the University of Sydney, where he stayed until 1977. He now writes full-time and lives part of the year in Australia and part in southern Tuscany in Italy.

Malouf has won numerous prizes for his work including the NSW Premier's Literary Award for An Imaginary Life in 1979, The Age Book of the Year Award in 1982 for Fly Away Peter, the Miles Franklin Award in 1991 and the 1991 Commonwealth Prize for fiction for The Great World. Remembering Babylon won the NSW Premier's Literary Award in 1993, and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. In June 1996, the novel was awarded the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, valued at 100,000 Irish punts. This is currently the world's largest literary award.

Malouf's most recent novel, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, was nominated for the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award.

In 1998 David Malouf was invited to deliver the Boyer Lectures on ABC Radio. These six lectures "...explore how living in one hemisphere and inheriting our culture from another affects who we are and the sort of world we make for ourselves in Australia." The Boyer Lectures are delivered each year by a prominent Australian who is invited "...to present their ideas, and the results of his or her work and thinking on major social, scientific or cultural issues".

Bibliography

Novels
Johnno 1975
An Imaginary Life 1978
Harland's Half Acre 1984
The Great World 1990
Remembering Babylon 1993
The Conversations at Curlow Creek 1996

Novellas
Fly Away Peter 1981 (aka The Bread of Time to Come)

Collections
Antipodes 1985
Child's Play 1982
Untold Tales 1999
Dream Stuff 2000

Other Short Story Publications
"The Only Speaker of His Tongue" - appears in The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories selected by Michael Wilding

Poetry
Bicycle and Other Poems 1970 (aka The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems)
Neighbours in a Thicket 1974
Poems 1975-76 1976
First Things Last 1980
Wild Lemons 1980
Selected Poems 1980
Selected Poems 1991
David Malouf: Poems 1959-89 1992

Drama
Blood Relations 1988

Opera
In 1978 Malouf wrote the libretto of Patrick White's Voss, an opera commissioned by the Australian Opera.
Mer de Glace 1991 co-written with Richard Meale.

Autobiography
12 Edmondstone Street 1985

Edited
Gesture of a Hand 1975 - an anthology of Australian verse

Non-Fiction
A Spirit of Play: Boyer Lectures 1998 1998

Critical Appraisals
Sheer Edge: Aspects of Identity in David Malouf's Writing by Karin Hansson

Other David Malouf Pages
Cécile Fouache, from the Université de Rouen in France, has done a fair amount of research on a PhD thesis on contemporary Australian literature including a large bibliography of Malouf's Prose Works.

This page and its contents are copyright © 1996-2003 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: December 4, 2003.