Malouf was awarded the Lloyd O’Neil Award in 2008 in recognition of his outsize contributions to Australian literature and publishing, and in the same year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, based in London. In 1993, Malouf published Remembering Babylon, winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize among others and making the short-list for the prestigious Booker Prize. Malouf went on to publish several more award-winning novels and novellas about Australia during both World Wars, and he also worked on several plays and theater productions in the 1980s. His first novel, Johnno, a semi-autobiographical novel about boyhood in Brisbane, was published in 1975 and later adapted for theater in 2004. In 1968, Malouf returned to his home country, lecturing for another ten years at the University of Sydney before becoming a full-time writer in 1978. He studied at University of Queensland, which he graduated from in 1955, and became a lecturer, working first in Australia before relocating to London to teach at Holland Park and later Birkenhead. Malouf was a prolific reader as a child, absorbing such sophisticated classics as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights by age 12.

David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934, one of two children to a Lebanese father and an English-Jewish mother.

Remembering Babylon by David Malouf