Peter Cowan
Peter Cowan was an influential Australian writer and educator, born on November 4, 1914, in Perth. He was the grandson of Edith Dircksey Cowan, Australia’s first female member of Parliament. After a varied early career, including work as a clerk and farm laborer, Cowan pursued higher education, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English and philosophy from the University of Western Australia in 1941. He served in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II, which later informed his literary work, including his novel "The Hills of Apollo Bay."
Cowan's first published short story appeared in 1943, and he continued to create significant works throughout his life, including the short story collection "Drift" and the novel "Summer." He was dedicated to promoting Western Australian literature, coediting the journal "Westerly" and anthologies spotlighting regional writing. His literary contributions earned him several accolades, including the Patrick White Literary Award in 1992. Cowan's writing often explored themes of isolation and human anxiety against the backdrop of Western Australia’s rural landscape. He passed away on June 6, 2002, leaving behind a legacy celebrated through the Peter Cowan Writers Centre at Edith Cowan University.
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Peter Cowan
Writer
- Born: November 4, 1914
- Birthplace: Perth, Western Australia, Australia
- Died: June 6, 2002
Biography
Peter Walkinshaw Cowan was the grandson of Australia’s first female member of Parliament, Edith Dircksey Cowan. He was born on November 4, 1914, in Perth, Australia. A year earlier his father, Norman Walkinshaw Cowan, a barrister and solicitor, married his mother, Marie Emilie Johnston. His father died in 1925, and the younger of his two sisters, Elizabeth, died when she was fourteen years old.
After a brief stint in primary school, Cowan entered Wesley College in 1924. Six years later, he left the college to begin a decade of various positions from clerk with the Commercial Union Assurance Company in Perth to farm laborer. In 1935, he returned to night school at Perth Technical College, then transferred to in the University of Western Australia. Helped by a Hackett award, he was able to study full-time from 1938 to 1940. During this time, he began writing short stories.
He received his bachelor of arts in English and philosophy in 1941, and he married Edith Howard. Cowan served in the Royal Australian Air Force from 1943 to 1945. His experiences form the background for his novel written decades later, The Hills of Apollo Bay (1989). His first short story was published in 1943 in Angry Penguins, a short-lived magazine devoted to modernist literature. In 1944, Cowan’s short-story collection Drift appeared, and his son, Julian, was born.
After the war, Cowan began teaching, first part time for four years at the University of Western Australia where he had received his degree, and then for twelve years at Scotch College, Swanbourne, Western Australia. During this time, he published his second and third collections of short stories as well as his first novel, Summer (1964).
He received a Commonwealth Literary fellowship in 1963 to write his novel Seed. The following year, he began a fifteen-year teaching career at the University of Western Australia. He received two fellowships from the Australian Council for the Arts, one in 1975 and the other in 1980. From 1975 to 1992, Cowan coedited the journal Westerly and used his final academic position to promote the study of Western Australian literature. He coedited several anthologies of Western Australian writing, culminating in a bibliography on the subject. In 1986 his novel, The Color of the Sky, won a Western Australia Week literary award and in 1992, he won the Patrick White Literary Award, a $30,000 prize presented to a distinguished Australian writer.
The Color of the Sky, as well as Cowan’s best- known short story “The Red-Backed Spiders,” published in The Unploughed Land (1958), represents his modernist style and Australian focus. His characters are isolated individuals who are tied to the rugged rural landscape of Western Australia where Cowan spent his boyhood. The works are psychological studies of human anxieties presented in prose as matter-of-fact and stark as the unyielding landscape.
In 1995, Edith Cowan University, named for Cowan’s grandmother, located in Joondalup, Western Australia, opened the Peter Cowan Writers Centre to encourage writers and the study of Western Australian literature. Cowan received an honorary doctor of philosophy degree from the university that year. He died on June 6, 2002.