“The poetry was in the prose; it stayed and sprung its rhythms, chorded its ideas, concentrated its images,” Le wrote.<\/p>\n
Speaking to ABC Radio National’s Books and Arts<\/a> in 2016, Malouf reflected on the distinction between writing poetry, his first love, and prose.<\/p>\n “Poetry demands one kind of energy which is immediate; when you sit down and write that first draft it’s often in a burst of energy, although you might spend a long time \u2014 weeks, months, years even \u2014 before you’ve got that first draft in the shape of what you think of as being not a finished but a final poem,” he said.<\/p>\n “The energy that’s required of you for a novel is quite different; it’s very patient work where you sit down every morning at the desk and gradually discover what the shape is that you’re dealing with and that might be over months or even a year or two before the work is there.”<\/p>\n Malouf with Claudia Karvan, host of ABC TV’s Books That Made Us, which featured his 1975 novel Johnno. (ABC)<\/p>\n Malouf’s literary career began when he was first published as a poet in 1962.<\/p>\n He went on to publish seven novels, a novella, numerous short story and poetry collections and many non-fiction works.<\/p>\n A lifelong lover of music, he served as the opera critic for The National Times and wrote the libretto for Voss, Richard Meale’s 1986 adaptation of the Patrick White novel, commissioned by the Australian Opera.<\/p>\n Portrait of David Malouf (1980) by Jeffrey Smart. The pair were close friends who met when they were both living in Italy.<\/p>\n For many years, Malouf divided his time between Sydney and Tuscany. Later, he returned to Queensland and lived in an apartment tower overlooking the beach at Surfers Paradise, where he first read Jane Eyre as a 12-year-old on summer holidays.<\/p>\n In an essay published in his 2014 book The Writing Life, Malouf explained how he experienced writing as a passive, almost spiritual activity.<\/p>\n “It is the writing that shapes and leads the writer, not the other way round,” he wrote.<\/p>\n A subtropical childhood<\/p>\n Malouf was born in 1934 in Brisbane and grew up at 12 Edmondstone Street \u2014 the title of his 1985 memoir.<\/p>\n Reflecting on his childhood on the ABC’s Conversations with Richard Fidler<\/a> in 2014, he explained how his parents were an unlikely match.<\/p>\n His mother was born to a Jewish family in England, while his father, George, was a champion boxer from a Lebanese-Catholic family that had arrived in Australia in the 1880s.<\/p>\n It was through boxing that George met Malouf’s maternal grandfather, Elias Mendoza, a descendant of Daniel Mendoza, the Jewish prize-fighter who penned The Art of Boxing in 1792.<\/p>\n David Malouf: Reflections on a life of letters<\/a><\/p>\n The acclaimed author, poet and essayist speaks to Richard Fidler about his life and two of his more recent literary works.<\/p>\n Elias introduced George to his family, and the boxer quickly formed an attachment with Elias’s daughter, Welcome.<\/p>\n Their families’ combined opposition to the relationship kept the couple from marrying for more than a decade.<\/p>\n “I think all children are fascinated by the accident that brings their parents together and them into existence,” Malouf said.<\/p>\n His mother fostered in her bookish son a deep love of literature, particularly the English classics.<\/p>\n “She hung on very hard to her Englishness and she tried to re-create that in the household we lived in,” he told Romana Koval in a conversation<\/a> for The Monthly in 2014.<\/p>\n “We were brought up like little English kids. We would have never been allowed to go to school barefoot, and we weren’t allowed to use Australian slang.”<\/p>\n Malouf rarely discussed his later personal life, including the fact he was gay.<\/p>\n “I’m not very interested in any kind of essentialism, whether it’s about sexuality, or gender, or race or ethnicity,” he told publisher Ivor Indyk in 2014.<\/p>\n “All of those things bore me and I don’t want to come in under any of these banners.”<\/p>\n An evocation of Brisbane<\/p>\n After finishing an arts degree at the University of Queensland in 1955, Malouf left Australia at 24 and worked as a teacher in England.<\/p>\n He spent a decade abroad, travelling through Europe, where he was captivated by the art and architecture he encountered.<\/p>\n He returned to Australia in 1968 and began lecturing at Sydney University. Soon after, in 1970, he published his first poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems.<\/p>\n Malouf went on to earn significant plaudits during his literary career.<\/p>\n An Imaginary Life, the story of the Roman poet Ovid, won the 1979 NSW Premier’s Literary Award, while his novella Fly Away Peter was named The Age Book of the Year in 1982.<\/p>\n He won the 1991 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel The Great World, an epic tale spanning 70 years and two world wars.<\/p>\n Malouf based the character of Johnno on a school friend who died in 1962. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)<\/p>\n His next novel, Remembering Babylon, set in a remote colonial outpost in the 1850s, won a slew of international awards and made the 1993 Booker Prize shortlist.<\/p>\n But the author is especially remembered for his first novel, Johnno, a semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in Brisbane in the 1940s and 50s.<\/p>\n Published in 1975, the novel is a coming-of-age story centred on the friendship between the narrator, Dante, and the reckless and ill-fated Johnno.<\/p>\n The novel is famous for its evocation of mid-century Brisbane \u2014 its steamy subtropical climate, Queenslander houses, “jungle-damp” gardens and stifling provincialism:<\/p>\n Brisbane was nothing: a city that blew neither hot nor cold, a place where nothing happened, and where nothing ever would happen, because it had no soul. People suffered here without significance. It was too mediocre even to be a province of hell. It would have defeated Baudelaire. A place where poetry could never occur.<\/p>\n Johnno also captures the emergence of a distinct national voice following the “khaki and camouflage years” of World War II.<\/p>\n Malouf believed the expansiveness of the landscape gave Australians a different conception of time and space to Europeans.<\/p>\n “In Australia you feel that history is still happening, so you’re not the product so much of history as the makers of history,” he told Koval.<\/p>\n “We don’t look back. Sometimes that’s freeing; sometimes, of course, it means we’re escaping from responsibilities about things that have happened here \u2014 as in the case of Indigenous people, for example.<\/p>\n “We’re getting better at looking back. But mostly we look forward.”<\/p>\n A love of classical literature<\/p>\n Malouf’s last published novel, Ransom (2009), was a retelling of Homer’s Iliad, a story he first encountered when his teacher read his class an excerpt on a rainy afternoon in 1943.<\/p>\n Living in wartime Brisbane, Malouf experienced an instant affinity with the ancient tale.<\/p>\n David Malouf’s final interview on the ABC<\/a><\/p>\n The esteemed Brisbane writer joined ABC Radio National’s The Book Show to discuss the reissue of three collections of his poetry: An Open Book, Earth Hour and Typewriter Music.<\/p>\n “I felt very close to it \u2026 Brisbane was the staging point for the Pacific campaign, so we were surrounded by American soldiers \u2026 who were waiting to be taken off to the war or people coming back,” he told ABC Radio National’s The Book Show<\/a> in 2009.<\/p>\n “The war was very real.”<\/p>\n It was a watershed moment for the young Malouf and the beginning of a lifelong love of the classics that infused his poetry and prose.<\/p>\n He believed the Iliad was a work that had never been surpassed.<\/p>\n “What’s astonishing to me is [the Iliad] was written 27 centuries ago; it’s the first book in the canon of Western literature and, in many ways, it sets the standard,” he said.<\/p>\n “[It is] an example of what you can do with words and storytelling.”<\/p>\n Malouf marked his 80th birthday in 2014 with the publication of two books: the poetry collection Earth Hour, and collected prose writing A First Place.<\/p>\n He published his final collection, An Open Book, in 2018.<\/p>\n![\"Claudia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/38f5b707b33ab05b1a9b393ee61f8058.jpeg\")
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