Early life
Malouf was born in Brisbane, Australia, to a Christian Lebanese father and an English-born mother of Sephardi Jewish descent. His paternal family had immigrated from Lebanon in the 1880s, while his mother's family had moved to England via the Netherlands, before migrating to Australia in 1913. [4]
He attended Brisbane Grammar School and graduated from the University of Queensland with a B.A. degree in 1955. [1] He lectured for a short period before moving to London, where he taught at Holland Park School, before relocating to Birkenhead in 1962. [5] He returned to Australia in 1968, taught at his old school, [6] and lectured in English at the Universities of Queensland and Sydney. [7]
Writing
Though he would later become known abroad for his prose works, Malouf initially concentrated on poetry. [2] [10] His first work appeared in 1962, as part of a book he shared with three more Australian poets. [2]
His collection Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems (1974) features childhood memories, his mother, his sister, travelling in Europe and war. [10]
1992 brought the publication of Poems, 1959–1989. [2] Some of his poetry was also collected in Revolving Days: Selected Poems (2008), which is divided into four sections: on childhood, then Europe, then relocating to Sydney, then travelling between Europe and Australia. [10]
Malouf's first novel, Johnno (1975), is the semi-autobiographical tale of a young man growing up in Brisbane during the Second World War. [11] Johnno engages in shoplifting and goes to brothels, which contrasts with his friend Dante's middle-class conservatism. [10] La Boite Theatre adapted it for stage in 2006. [12] [13]
Malouf began writing full-time in 1977. [1]
An Imaginary Life (1978) is about the final years of Ovid. [10]
Malouf's 1982 novella about three acquaintances and their experience of the First World War was titled Fly Away Peter . [14]
His epic novel The Great World (1990) tells the story of two Australians and their relationship amid the turmoil of two World Wars, including imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II. [11]
His Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Remembering Babylon (1993) is set in northern Australia during the 1850s amid a community of English immigrant farmers (with one Scottish family) whose isolated existence is threatened by the arrival of a stranger, a young white man raised from boyhood by Indigenous Australians. [10]
Malouf has written several collections of short stories, and a play, Blood Relations (1988). [7] Australian critic Peter Craven described Malouf's 2007 short-story collection Every Move You Make as "as formidable and bewitching a collection of stories as you would be likely to find anywhere in the English-speaking world". [6] Craven went on to state that "No one else in this country has: the maintenance of tone, the expertness of prose, the easeful transition between lyrical and realist effects. The man is a master, a superb writer, and also (which is not the same thing) a completely sophisticated literary gent". [6] The Complete Stories appeared in 2007. [10]
Malouf has also written libretti for three operas (including Voss , an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Patrick White and first produced in the 1986 Adelaide Festival of Arts conducted by Stuart Challender), and Baa Baa Black Sheep (with music by Michael Berkeley), which combines a semi-autobiographical story by Rudyard Kipling with Kipling's Jungle Books . [7]
Malouf published his memoir, titled 12 Edmondstone Street, in 1985. [11]
Themes and subject matter
Malouf's work tends to be set in Australia, though "a European sensibility" is also present. [2]
His writing is characterised by a heightened sense of spatial relations, from the physical environments into which he takes his readers—whether within or outside built spaces, or in a natural landscape. He has likened each of his succession of novels to the discovery and exploration of a new room in a house, rather than part of an overarching development. "At a certain point, you begin to see what the connections are between things, and you begin to know what space it is you are exploring." [15] From his first novel Johnno onwards, his themes focused on "male identity and soul-searching". [6] He said that much of the male writing that preceded him "was about the world of action. I don't think that was ever an accurate description of men's lives". [6] He identified Patrick White as the writer who turned this around in Australian literature—that White's writing was the kind "that goes behind inarticulacy and or unwillingness to speak, writing that gives the language of feeling to people who don't have it themselves". [6]
Malouf also said that "I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives". [6] However, after nearly four decades of writing, he concluded that in older writers can sometimes be found "a fading of the intensity of the imagination, and ... of the interest in the tiny details of life and behaviour—you see [writers] getting a bit impatient with that." [16]
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