Malouf, David George Joseph

▪ 1997

      In May 1996, after a meeting that lasted five days, Australia's David Malouf beat 125 nominees from 50 countries and a final shortlist of six other major authors—V.S. Naipaul, José Saramago, Jane Urquhart, Connie Palmen, Cees Nooteboom, and John Banville—to win the inaugural International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his sixth novel, Remembering Babylon (1993). The prize money of £Ir 100,000 (about $160,000) was greater than that offered by the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Miles Franklin Award, and the Booker Prize.

      Remembering Babylon is the story of a British-born young man in the 1840s who is cast away off Queensland as a boy and rescued by Aborigines, only to find himself trapped between two cultures when he returns to life among white colonials. The book had already won the New South Wales (NSW) Premier's Literary Award and been shortlisted for the 1994 Booker. Malouf continued to explore the challenges of multicultural Australia and the spiritual power of the outback in his acclaimed 1996 novel, The Conversations at Curlow Creek. Set in 1827, this work examines the growing bond between a condemned Irish convict and the immigrant Irish bush ranger sent to hang him.

      Malouf could draw on a long personal history both for his understanding of multiculturalism and for his poetic style. The son of a Lebanese Christian father and a British-born Portuguese Jewish mother, he was born March 20, 1934, and educated at the University of Queensland. He worked as a university lecturer in Sydney (1968-77), but he spent many years living off and on in Europe, particularly in Italy.

      In 1970 Malouf published Bicycle and Other Poems, the first of 11 volumes of poetry, for which he won such awards as the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. His career as a prizewinning novelist began in earnest with the NSW Premier's award for his second novel, An Imaginary Life (1978). His other popular and successful works of fiction include Johnno (1975), Fly Away Peter (1982), Harland's Half Acre (1984), and The Great World (1990). Additional literary prizes included the Miles Franklin Award, the Adelaide Festival Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the French Prix Fémina Étranger. He also wrote short stories, plays, three opera librettos, and an autobiography, 12 Edmonstone Street (1985). (A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

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