Patrick White (1912-1990) was born in London and traveled to Sydney
with his Australian parents six months later. White was a solitary,
precocious, asthmatic child and at thirteen was sent to an English
boarding school, a miserable experience. At eighteen he returned to
Australia and worked as a jackaroo on an isolated sheep station.
Two years later, he went up to Cambridge, settling afterwards in
London, where he published his first two books. White joined
the RAF in 1940 and served as an intelligence officer in
the Middle East. At war’s end, he and his partner, Manoly Lascaris,
bought an old house in a Sydney suburb, where they lived with their
four Schnauzers. For the next eighteen years, the two men farmed
their six acres while White worked on some of his finest novels,
including The Tree of Man(1955), Voss (1957),
and Riders in the Chariot (1961). When he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in 1973, he did not attend the ceremony but, with his
takings and some of his own money, created an award to help older
writers who hadn’t received their due: the first recipient was
Christina Stead. Late in life, when asked for a list of his loves,
White responded: “Silence, the company of friends, unexpected
honesty, reading, going to the pictures, dreams, uncluttered
landscapes, city streets, faces, good food, cooking small meals,
whisky, sex, pugs, the thought of an Australian republic, my ashes
floating off at last.”
David Malouf is a novelist and poet. His novel The Great
Worldwas awarded the Commonwealth Prize and Remembering
Babylon was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has received
the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles
TimesBook Award. He lives in Sydney, Australia.
A poetically vivid narrative…It is a finely written novel with a
rare flavor.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Riders in the Chariot is the most compassionate and the most
beautiful of all Patrick White’s works; colours fly everywhere; his
words, comic, ecstatic, are like the brushstrokes on a canvas by
Nolan or Blake.
— Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín, The Modern Library: The 200
Best Novels in English Since 1950
Patrick White is an outsider, and his characters are outsiders,
outlaws, afflicted, and linked by their affliction. The visionary
element in his novels is inseparable from a tough irony and a
microscopically close, sometimes savage attention to physical
minutiae. The coarser the texture of the physical—of bodies
especially—the more likely to be illuminated by flashes of meaning
and power.
— Rosemary Dinnage
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