Now on sale
Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
Email article | 
Digg it | 
del.icio.us |
Print article
David Malouf at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, 2006. Photo: Prudence Upton. Used with kind permission.
David Malouf was born in Brisbane, in Queensland, Australia, in 1934. His father’s family came to Australia from Lebanon in the 1880s and his mother’s from London before World War I. His first book of poetry, Bicycle and Other Poems, appeared in 1970 and his Selected Poems 1959–89 was published in 1994. Although as a writer of fiction he has been profoundly concerned with history and psychology, it is clear from his novels and short stories that he began as a poet with a deep interest in tone and rhythm and image. He has also written prose of great beauty about the Australian landscape. His first novel, Johnno, appeared in 1975; his short novel about Ovid in Tomis, An Imaginary Life, in 1978. In Fly Away Peter (1981) and The Great World (1990), he dramatized the Australian experience in the First and Second World Wars; his two subsequent novels, Remembering Babylon (1993) and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) dealt with the legacy of Australian history. His Complete Stories has just appeared in the United States from Pantheon.
He lives in Sydney now, wearing his position as Australia’s most eminent writer very lightly indeed. For many years he had a house in Italy, and traveled often to England and Ireland, but over the past decade he has remained for the most part happily in his home country, watching its changing cultural moods and political weather with great wisdom and good humor. Of all contemporary novelists, he is one of the best read—he can read in French, Italian, and German—and also knows a great deal about classical music and painting. In most of his fiction, however, he has dealt with innocent and powerless figures.
I have been a friend and admirer of Malouf’s for many years. This conversation was recorded by phone, while I was in Barcelona and he was eight hours ahead in Sydney.
