Blanche d'Alpuget | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Josephine Blanche d'Alpuget 3 January 1944 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia |
| Occupation | |
| Education | SCEGGS Darlinghurst |
| Alma mater | University of Sydney |
| Genre | |
| Years active | 1973–present |
| Notable works | Mediator Robert J. Hawke, A Biography Turtle Beach The Young Lion |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
Josephine Blanche d'Alpuget (born 3 January 1944) is an Australian writer and the second wife of Bob Hawke, the longest-serving Labor Prime Minister of Australia.
D'Alpuget is the only child of Josephine Curgenven and Louis Albert Poincaré d'Alpuget (1915–2006), journalist, author, blue water yachtsman and champion boxer. Her great-aunt, Blanche d'Alpuget, after whom she was named, was a pioneer woman journalist in Sydney and a patron of artists. [1] Her father was a sports and feature writer and also news editor of a Sydney newspaper, The Sun .
D'Alpuget attended SCEGGS Darlinghurst and briefly the University of Sydney. She worked at The Sun's rival newspaper, The Daily Mirror , then moved to Indonesia at the age of 22 with her first husband, Tony Pratt, whom she had married in 1965. [2] She and Pratt have a son, Louis, an artist and sculptor [3] and a co-founder of Mungo, a Sydney artists' colony. While in Indonesia, d'Alpuget worked in the Australian Embassy's news and information bureau; later she was a volunteer worker in the National Museum of Indonesia, leading a team that recatalogued the oriental ceramic collection of Chinese export ware. She was the world's youngest member of the famous English-founded Oriental Ceramic Society. After spending four years in Indonesia, d'Alpuget lived for a year in Malaysia. She travelled widely, and to remote areas, in both countries.
In 1973 d'Alpuget returned to Australia and became active in the women's movement. She began writing in 1974, inspired by her experiences in South East Asia and has won a number of literary awards for both fiction and non-fiction including, in 1987, the inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature. [4] d'Alpuget first met Bob Hawke in Jakarta, in 1970. They met again in 1976 when she interviewed him for a biography she was writing on Sir Richard Kirby. This meeting led to a long and sporadic love affair which eventually culminated in their marriage in 1995. D'Alpuget and Pratt had divorced in 1986. Between 1979 and 1982 d'Alpuget researched and wrote a biography of Hawke.[ citation needed ]
In 1995 she joined the board of Robert J. Hawke & Associates, a business consultancy primarily focussed on China. For fifteen years d'Alpuget abandoned her career as a writer and travelled the world with her new husband, visiting not only capital cities but remote areas of China, Inner Mongolia, Moldova, Easter Island, Palau, Kazakhstan, the North West Frontier of Pakistan and the Antarctic peninsula. She returned to writing in 2008.
In 2013 d'Alpuget released The Young Lion , the first novel of a quintet. Set in the 12th century, the novel is about the birth of the House of Plantagenet and focuses on Henry II and his union with Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was Queen of France and subsequently became Queen of England. The Young Lion received favourable reviews. Geraldine Doogue said "this is exuberant story-telling history, full of sex, passion and politics." while Stephanie Dowrick notes that "few writers are both earthy and erudite, Blanche d'Alpuget is. Her narrative is so fresh and energetic you will swear she's bringing us a first-hand account." [5] The magazine Books + Publishing made similar comments stating that "Blanche d'Alpuget's first historical fiction novel comes as a breath of fresh air as she introduces readers to Henry II and the beginning of the House of Plantagenet. D'Alpuget offers readers a well-researched history of her subject, which of course incorporates the required affairs, plots and intrigues that we have come to expect from any historical novel about royalty and life at court." [6] The second in the quintet, The Lion Rampant, was published in 2014 to critical acclaim. Thomas Keneally said, "this is fresh and invigorating and absolutely gripping. The revision she provides of the motives and character of Thomas Becket will rivet readers as they have not been riveted since Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell." She completed the third novel in the quintet, The Lions' Torment, in 2015 but held it back from the market until the fourth, The Lioness Wakes, was finished in early 2017. The fifth book in the quintet, The Cubs Roar, was published in 2020. Meanwhile, she is researching the Second Crusade.
Her works include:
Her essays, Lust, which dealt with paedophilia, and On Longing, caused controversy.
Turtle Beach was made into a feature film in 1989 featuring Greta Scacchi and Jack Thompson.
All d'Alpuget's novels have been translated into other languages.
Asher Keddie played her in the 2010 multi-award-winning telemovie, Hawke .
Included in awards are: [7]
Robert James Lee Hawke was an Australian politician and trade unionist who served as the 23rd prime minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991. He held office as the leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), having previously served as the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1969 to 1980 and president of the Labor Party national executive from 1973 to 1978.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Kathleen Kylie Tennant AO was an Australian novelist, playwright, short-story writer, critic, biographer, and historian.
Hazel Susan HawkeAO was the first wife of Bob Hawke, the 23rd Prime Minister of Australia. She married him in 1956, and supported him throughout his prime ministership (1983–1991); they divorced in 1995. She worked in social policy areas, and was an amateur pianist and a patron of the arts. After she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, she made public appearances in order to raise awareness of the disease.
Dorothy Featherstone Porter was an Australian poet. She was a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry.
Catherine Elizabeth Grenville is an Australian author. She has published fifteen books, including fiction, non-fiction, biography, and books about the writing process. In 2001, she won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection, and in 2006 she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Secret River. The Secret River was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Janette Turner Hospital is an Australian-born novelist and short story writer who has lived most of her adult life in Canada or the United States, principally Boston (Massachusetts), Kingston (Ontario) and Columbia. She also uses the penname "Alex Juniper".
William Albert Landeryou was an Australian trade unionist and politician. He was a member of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and served in the Victorian Legislative Council from 1976 to 1992, including as a minister in the Labor government of John Cain. Before entering politics he was a senior official in the Storemen and Packers' Union.
Lily Brett is an Australian novelist, essayist and poet. She lived in North Carlton and then Elwood/Caulfield from 1948 to 1968, in London 1968–1971, Melbourne (1971–1989) and then moved permanently to New York City. In Australia she had an early career as a pop music journalist, including writing for music magazine Go-Set from May 1966 to September 1968. From 1979 she started writing poems, prose fiction and non-fiction. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, her works include depictions of family life including living in Melbourne and New York. Four of her fictional novels are Things Could Be Worse (1990), Just Like That (1994), Too Many Men (2001) and You Gotta Have Balls (2005).
Alison Croggon is a contemporary Australian poet, playwright, fantasy novelist, and librettist.
For the British artist, Margaret Geddes (1914-1998), see Margaret Geddes (artist).
Nancy Phelan was an Australian writer who published over 25 books, including novels, biographies, memoirs, travel books and a cookbook. She travelled widely throughout Europe, the Pacific, Asia and the Middle East.
Jennifer Maiden is an Australian poet. She was born in Penrith, New South Wales, and has had 38 books published: 29 poetry collections, 6 novels and 3 nonfiction works. Her current publishers are Quemar Press in Australia and Bloodaxe Books in the UK. She began writing professionally in the late 1960s and has been active in Sydney's literary scene since then. She took a BA at Macquarie University in the early 1970s. She has one daughter, Katharine Margot Toohey. Aside from writing, Jennifer Maiden runs writers workshops with a variety of literary, community and educational organizations and has devised and co-written a manual of questions to facilitate writing by Torture and Trauma Victims. Later, Maiden and Bennett used the questions they had created as a basis for a clinically planned workbook.
Janine Burke is an Australian author, art historian, biographer, novelist and photographer. She also curates exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. She is Honorary Senior Fellow, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She was born in Melbourne in 1952.
Catriona (Cat) Sparks is an Australian science fiction writer, editor and publisher.
Hawke is a 2010 television drama film produced by The Film Company for Network Ten. The film premiered on 18 July 2010.
The Young Lion is a 2013 historical novel by Blanche d'Alpuget. It is set in the 12th century and is the first in a future quartet about the Plantagenet dynasty which reigned in the Middle Ages. The book tells the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the restless and bold Henry Plantagenet, who later became Henry II of England.
Dorothy June Wright was an Australian writer. She wrote six popular crime novels between 1948 and 1966, all with recognisable settings in and around Melbourne. She also wrote many articles for Catholic lay journals such as The Majellan, Caritas and Scapular and the Catholic newspaper The Advocate. She recorded her personal memoirs and family history in two volumes in 1994 and 1997.
Lisa Gorton is an Australian poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist. She is the author of four award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion, Empirical, and Mirabilia. Her second novel, The Life of Houses, received the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction (shared). Gorton is also the editor of Black Inc's anthology Best Australian Poems 2013.
Louise Milligan is an Australian author and investigative reporter for the ABC TV Four Corners program. As of March 2021, she is the author of two award-winning non-fiction books. Her first novel, Pheasants Nest, was published in 2024.
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