.jpg)
David Malouf is the award-winning Australian author of short story collections The Complete Stories (2008) (winner of the Australia Asia Literary Award), Dream Stuff (2000), (‘these stories are pearls,’ Spectator) and Every Move You Make (2007). He has also written a number of acclaimed novels including The Great World (1990) (winner of The Commonwealth Writers’ and Miles Franklin Prizes) and Remembering Babylon (1993) (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Impac Dublin Literary Award). He also writes poetry, drama and libretti for operas. Born and brought up in Brisbane, he lives in Sydney. His latest novel, Ransom, will be published in April 2009. His visit is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Read about David Malouf's Remembering Babylon on The New York Times website
Read an excerpt from David Malouf's book Dream Stuff
Read an interview with David Malouf about his book The Conversations at Curlow Creek
BOOKS
The Great World
Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In The Great World, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But The Great World is more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.
Dream Stuff
From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother's GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father 'missing in action', to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man. These powerfully vivid stories by a great writer range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to 'blacksoil country', from scrub and outback to city streets-evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.
Every Move You Make
Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy – here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly into focus and so powerfully rooted in the landscape that you can almost feel the heat and the dust. His canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate. A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer’s life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and, in the funniest, most surprising story of all, a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock. Malouf’s men and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life, puzzling over the space they’ll leave behind when the waters close over them… This is a heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying collection by a master storyteller, one of the great writers of our time.
"Malouf, always so precise in his characterisation, so poetic in his evocations of nature and so haunting in his insight into loneliness and frustrated love, is a writer to treasure."
- Francis Quinn, Literary Review
"Graceful and unsettling… Malouf’s prose is invariably elegant."
- David Flusfeder, Financial Times
Ransom
With learning worn lightly and in his own lyrical language, David Malouf revisits Homer's Iliad. Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam and the cart-driver hired to retrieve Hector's body. Pride, grief, brutality, love and neighbourliness are explored. The minute you finish this novel you will want to return to the beginning and start all over again.
"David Malouf, as fine a writer as Australia has produced, reveals a deft skill as a polemicist as he probes that seemingly eternal conundrum of Australian identity." - The Sydney Morning Herald
"David Malouf's fiction has been justly celebrated for its veracity. His prose, at once lyrical and precise, has an extraordinary capacity to evoke what a character in an early story called the 'grainy reality' of life." - Australian Book review