Patrick White

Patrick White was born in London in 1912 to wealthy Australian pastoral parents who were travelling in England, and was raised in Sydney and on the family’s rural properties. Asthmatic and solitary, he was sent at thirteen to Cheltenham College in England, an exile he found miserable, and later read modern languages at King’s College, Cambridge. His first published novel, Happy Valley, appeared in 1939. During the Second World War he served as an intelligence officer with the Royal Air Force in the Middle East, and in Alexandria met the Greek Manoly Lascaris, who would be his companion for nearly five decades.

In 1948 the two settled on a small farm outside Sydney. There White wrote the books that established him: The Tree of Man, a chronicle of a pioneering couple’s life on the land, and Voss, the story of a German explorer’s doomed crossing of the interior. Drawing on European modernism rather than the bush realism dominant in Australian letters, he built a dense, often difficult prose in which religious longing, isolation and the mystery of identity are worked out among ordinary people — in Riders in the Chariot, The Solid Mandala and The Eye of the Storm. Some Australian critics bristled; readers abroad took notice.

The Nobel Prize in 1973 made him the only Australian laureate in literature; he used the prize money to found an award for older Australian writers who had received too little recognition. In later life he spoke out against the Vietnam War, in support of Aboriginal rights and on environmental and nuclear issues, published the candid self-portrait Flaws in the Glass (1981), and continued to write for the theatre. He died at home in Sydney in 1990.