David Malouf

Writer

• Born: March 20, 1934
• Place of Birth: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Biography

David George Joseph Malouf shows diversity in his background and writing. He was born in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, Australia. He grew up in this provincial city and graduated from the University of Queensland in 1954. His mother was of British descent, and his father was Lebanese. This meant that Malouf identified with Australia and Europe from an early age. At twenty-five, after working temporary jobs in Brisbane, he moved to England, where he taught until 1968 when he returned to Australia. He lectured in literature for the next ten years at the University of Sydney. After publishing several books of poetry and two novels, he devoted himself entirely to writing and moved to a Tuscan village. In 1985, he began to divide his time between Italy and Australia and traveled in Europe and North America, insisting that he was not an expatriate. The autobiographical essays in 12 Edmondstone Street (1985) attempt to explain his double attachment to Australia and Europe.

This tow between two continents manifests in Malouf’s writing, which draws from both worlds. His major preoccupations are the oppositional forces within each individual and those in nature. He has chosen a wide range of literary forms to express these concerns.

Malouf was first published as a poet in 1962 when he shared a book with three other Australian poets. Three more collections of poems appeared before the publication of his first novel, Johnno, in 1975. He continued to write verse, with Poems, 1959–1989 published in 1992. Commenting on his poetry, Malouf said: “I wrote poetry for a long time before I wrote prose that I thought publishable, and I think that you learn habits of working as a poet which I’ve used in making the fictions, so I think they are in their structures very poetic.” Although highly regarded in Australia for poetry and fiction, Malouf has gained an international reputation through his novels.

In Johnno, Malouf recreates his Brisbane childhood during World War II, when the sleepy city, threatened by Japanese invasion, became the center of operations for Allied troops. While often praised for capturing wartime Brisbane, the novel more significantly examines the oppositions between the two main characters—Johnno and Dante—what Malouf describes as “involvement and withdrawal, action and contemplation.” In fact, Johnno and Dante may be one person, and the novel, itself, an exploration of the conflicts in the author’s own consciousness.

Many critics consider Malouf’s second novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), his best work. Its action is distant in time and place from Australia, but this short, poetic, meditative book recounts Ovid’s exile from Rome. The Roman poet, forced to live a primitive life along the Black Sea, discovers disconnection from his language as the harshest punishment, for he can no longer negotiate his experience. Like Johnno, the novel develops an oppositional relationship, this time between the sophisticated Ovid and a wild boy reared by wolves.

Child’s Play (1982) contains three short stories. In the title piece, Malouf relies on a factual account of an Italian terrorist who plots to murder a famous writer but gradually finds himself mysteriously linked to his target. Here, Malouf takes up the theme of opposition through the metaphor of assailant and victim. A novella published the same year, Fly Away Peter, relates the story of a Queensland soldier in World War I and focuses on the contrast between landscapes he experiences: the life-destructive trenches of the European war and the life-affirming Australian countryside. Several years later, Malouf again addressed the twofold experience of war and peace in The Great World (1990), a chronicle of Australian soldiers captured by the Japanese during World War II. Continuing until 1987, the narrative follows two of these men, who—like Johnno and Dante—express opposing views of life.

Relying on his Brisbane childhood as a setting, Malouf directs his attention to the artist in Harland’s Half Acre (1984), a fully developed and richly textured novel. Here, the opposition lies in the singular distinction between the artist—in this case, a painter—and the ordinary person. Eighteenth-century Queensland serves as the setting for Remembering Babylon (1993), which relates the story of a young Englishman who has lived for years with Aboriginal Australians and then joins a pioneer settlement of Scottish immigrants. Not only is the theme of language worked out—the man has lost his native English—but the oppositions are at play again as well in the contrast between civilization and primitivism, past and present, darkness and light, understanding and ignorance, compassion and hatred. This novel is reminiscent of An Imaginary Life, sometimes to the former’s detriment. The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) contrasts two Irishmen in Australia, one a soldier and one a convict, who spend a night in conversation, which is supposed to end with the convict’s execution.

Malouf continued to publish throughout the twenty-first century Ransom (2009) is a retelling of books 22 through 24 of the Iliad, in which Achilles slays Hector in revenge for the death of his friend Patroclus and then repeatedly drags Hector's body around the walls of Troy behind his chariot. The action then moves to the efforts of Priam, king of Troy and father of Hector, to get his son's body back from Achilles for a proper burial. Malouf also published the short story collections Every Move You Make (2006) and The Complete Stories (2007). Additionally, Malouf continued writing poetry. He published collections of new poems, Typewriter Music (2007), Earth Hour (2014), and An Open Book (2018), as well as a volume compiling some of his best pieces, Revolving Days: Selected Poems (2008). 

Malouf has been highly awarded throughout his literary career. He has been shortlisted for the Booker and International Booker Prizes and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize multiple times. In 2000, Malouf was awarded the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature for his work. In 2016, Malouf was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Although moving between Australia and Europe for most of his life, Malouf has often taken Australia as the setting for his work. Still, he has been described as a writer with a European sensibility. Possibly, this opposition of place has enriched his work.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Johnno, 1975

An Imaginary Life, 1978

The Bread of Time to Come, 1981 (also known as Fly Away Peter, 1982)

Harland’s Half Acre, 1984

The Great World, 1990

Remembering Babylon, 1993

The Conversations at Curlow Creek, 1996

Ransom, 2009

Short Fiction:

“Child’s Play,” “The Bread of Time to Come”: Two Novellas, 1981

“Child’s Play,” with “Eustace” and “The Prowler,” 1982

Antipodes, 1985

Untold Tales, 1999

Dream Stuff, 2000

Every Move You Make, 2006

The Complete Stories, 2007

Drama:

Voss, pr. 1986 (opera libretto)

Blood Relations, pr., pb. 1988

Mer de Glace, pr. 1991 (opera libretto, with Richard Meale)

Baa Baa Black Sheep: A Jungle Tale, pr. 1993 (libretto; music by Michael Berkeley); Jane Eyre, pb. 2000 (libretto; music by Berkeley)

Poetry:

“Interiors,” in Four Poets, 1962

Bicycle, and Other Poems, 1970 (also known as The Year of the Foxes, and Other Poems, 1979)

Neighbours in a Thicket, 1974

Poems, 1975-1976, 1976

Wild Lemons: Poems, 1980

First Things Last, 1981

Selected Poems, 1981

Selected Poems, 1991

Poems, 1959–1989, 1992

Typewriter Music, 2007

Revolving Days: Selected Poems, 2008

Earth Hour, 2014

An Open Book, 2018

Nonfiction:

12 Edmondstone Street, 1985 (autobiography)

A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness, 1998

A First Place, 2014

On Experience, 2008

"The Happy Life," 2011

The Writing Life: Book 2, 2014

Being There, 2015

Edited Texts:

We Took Their Orders and Are Dead: An Anti-War Anthology, 1971 (with Shirley Cass, Ros Cheney, and Michael Wilding)

Gesture of a Hand, 1975

New Currents in Australian Writing, 1978 (with Katharine Brisbane and R. F. Brissenden)

Miscellaneous:

David Malouf: “Johnno,” Short Stories, Poems, Essays, and Interview, 1990 (James Tulip, editor)

Bibliography

Brittan, Alice. “B-b-british Objects: Possession, Naming, and Translation in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon.” Publications of the Modern Language Association, vol. 117, Oct. 2002, pp. 1158–71.

Doty, Kathleen, and Riston Hiltunen. “The Power of Communicating Without Words—David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon.” Antipodes, vol. 10, 1996, pp. 99–105.

Düddul, Pema. “The Case for David Malouf's An Imaginary Life.” The Conversation, 15 July 2014, theconversation.com/the-case-for-david-maloufs-an-imaginary-life-28201. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Hassan, Ihab. "Encomium: David Malouf." World Literature Today, vol. 74.4, 2000, pp. 740–48.

Indyk, Ivor. David Malouf. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1993.

Indyk, Ivor. "David Malouf: A Life in Letters." Sydney Review of Books, 4 July 2014, sydneyreviewofbooks.com/david-malouf-earth-hour-first-place. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Jose, Nicholas. “Celebrating David Malouf at 90.” Giramondo Publishing, 14 Mar. 2024, giramondopublishing.com/celebrating-david-malouf-at-90. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Malouf, David. Interview by Brigid Rooney. Australian Literary Studies, vol. 25.1, 2010, pp. 82–96.

Nettelbeck, Amanda, editor. Provisional Maps: Critical Essays on David Malouf. Nedlands: U of Western Australia, 1994.

Nielsen, Philip. Imagined Lives: A Study of David Malouf. Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 1996.

Taylor, Andrew. “Origin, Identity, and the Body in David Malouf’s Fiction.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 19, May 1999, pp. 3–14.

Willbanks, Ray. “Interview with David Malouf.” Australian Voices. Austin: U of Texas P, 1991.