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Swords And Crowns And Rings Text Classics
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Book Synopsis Swords and Crowns and Rings: Text Classics by : Ruth Park
Download or read book Swords and Crowns and Rings: Text Classics written by Ruth Park and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Park’s Miles Franklin-winning novel brilliantly evokes Australia in the midst of the Great Depression. Written with warmth and affection, Swords and Crowns and Rings is a powerful story about human nature and the strength of an unlikely love.
Book Synopsis Swords and Crowns and Rings by : Ruth Park
Download or read book Swords and Crowns and Rings written by Ruth Park and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jackie Hanna, born with dwarfism, and Cushie Moy, the girl next door, share an innocent love - a love that will be censured, but will persevere. This is the story of the triumph of a special kind of courage.
Book Synopsis Swords and Crowns and Rings by : Ruth Park
Download or read book Swords and Crowns and Rings written by Ruth Park and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Park's Miles Franklin - winning novel brilliantly evokes Australia in the midst of the Great Depression. Growing up in an Australian country town before World War I, Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy are carefree and innocent in their love for each other. But Jackie is a dwarf, and his devotion to the beautiful Cushie is condemned by her parents. This is the story of their lifelong odyssey, and of the triumph of a special kind of courage. Written with warmth and affection, Swords and Crowns and Rings is a powerful story about human nature and the strength of an unlikely love. Ruth Park brilliantly captures the mood of Australia in the first part of the twentieth century.
Book Synopsis The Cardboard Crown: Text Classics by : Martin Boyd
Download or read book The Cardboard Crown: Text Classics written by Martin Boyd and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Australia and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, The Cardboard Crown presents an unforgettable portrait of an upper middle-class family who love both countries but are not quite at home in either. Martin Boyd is a deeply humane novelist, a writer of family sagas without peer.
Download or read book Editing Fiction written by Alice Grundy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Editing Fiction considers the collaborative efforts of literary production as well as editorial practice in its own right, using case studies by Australian novelists Jessica Anderson, Thea Astley and Ruth Park. An emphasis on collaboration is necessary because literary criticism often takes books as finite, discrete works rather than the result of multiple contributors, engaged to differing degrees. The editorial process always involves a negotiation over edits for the sake of the work, taking its potential reception or projected sales into account. Through examination of the archives, this Element shows that editing can be formative, limiting, commercially directed, a literary collaboration – or a mix of all these interventions. For editors and scholars alike, the Element examines practices of the recent past, seeking to determine the responsibilities of editors and publishers to authors, the text itself and to society; and the interrelation of editorial work, social conditions and market forces.
Book Synopsis The Suburbs of Hell by : Randolph Stow
Download or read book The Suburbs of Hell written by Randolph Stow and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His eyes are on the one eye of the rifle. His mouth splits open his brown beard. He throws up a hand, palm outward, in an unwilled, futile gesture to ward off death. A killer is hounding the seaside town of Old Tornwich. Residents are gripped by fear and suspicion, and the finger of blame is pointed in all directions. But the bodies keep falling and the crimes remain unsolved, the culprit at large. No mere whodunnit, The Suburbs of Hell—its story inspired by a real-life serial killer—is a profoundly disturbing psychological drama with a devastating conclusion, the final work of one of Australia’s greatest writers. Julian Randolph 'Mick' Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer's third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished. He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite. For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’. Praise for The Suburbs of Hell ‘Both a traditional murder mystery and a meditation on the random depredations of death.’ Australian Book Review ‘Poetic accuracy is only one aspect of a rich talent...Mr Stow has a narrative gift as well...He is, in fact a real novelist.’ Observer ‘A cleverly crafted whodunit... Stow is an example of the high calibre of Australian writers of yesterday. Many of these authors have been forgotten or perhaps overlooked. It’s pleasing to see that Text Publishing released this edition in 2015 and continue to foster some of Australia’s buried talents by re-publishing under Text Classics. For fans of the psychological thriller and those readers who enjoy a foray into a metaphorical tale, Stow delivers the goods.’ Salty Popcorn
Download or read book Drylands written by Thea Astley and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian
Download or read book I for Isobel written by Amy Witting and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2014-01-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Barbara Ramsden Prize, 1990. This was life: no sooner had you built yourself your little raft and felt secure than it came to pieces under you and you were swimming again. Born into a world without welcome, Isobel observes it as warily as an alien trying to pass for a native. Her collection of imaginary friends includes the Virgin Mary and Sherlock Holmes. Later she meets Byron, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. Isobel is not so much at ease with the flesh-and-blood people she meets, and least of all with herself, until a lucky encounter and a little detective work reveal her identity and her true situation in life. I for Isobel, a modern-day Australian classic, was followed by Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, winner of the Age Book of the Year Award. Amy Witting was born in Annandale, an inner suburb of Sydney, in 1918. She attended Sydney University, then taught French and English in state schools. Beginning late in life she published six novels, including The Visit, I for Isobel, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop and Maria's War; two collections of short stories; two books of verse, Travel Diary and Beauty is the Straw; and her Collected Poems. 'When we come to write the history of Australian writing in the twentieth century, the strange case of Amy Witting will be there to haunt us. Here is a writer who not only has great gifts - the kind of expert and mimetic gifts that would impel instant recognition from someone who admired a fine-lined American naturalist like William Maxwell - but a realist who has an effortless immediacy and a compelling sense of drama that should have ensured the widest kind of appeal, the sort of appeal that Helen Garner could command in her fiction-writing days. And yet this woman who published in the New Yorker and commanded the respect of Kenneth Slessor was scarcely encouraged during the long grey sleep of Australian fiction publishing. It wasn't until the publication of I for Isobel...that Witting gained a national profile.' Peter Craven 'Australia's Amy Witting is comparable to Jean Rhys, but she has more starch, or vinegar. The effect is bracing.' New Yorker 'Isobel is instinctively searching for a lost part of her substance, the very memory of which has been obliterated. Prompted by her inexplicable sense of loss, she goes on her way, deviating, baffled, yet rejecting substitutes. To call the ending happy is to say both too much and too little. Was the lost part also searching for her? Amy Witting's admirers will find this novel as distinctive and compelling as her stories and her poetry.' Jessica Anderson '[Witting] lays bare with surgical precision the dynamics of families, sibling, students in coffee shops, office coteries. One sometimes feels positively winded with unsettling insights. There is something relentless, almost unnerving in her anatomising of foibles, fears obsessions, private shame, the nature of loneliness, the nature of panic.' Janette Turner Hospital 'A beautifully but unobtrusively honed style, a marvellous ear for dialogue, a generous understanding of the complex waywardness of men and women.' Andrew Riemer 'Terrific - incredibly wise...When I finished it I went straight back to the first page.' Cate Kennedy
Book Synopsis A Stairway to Paradise by : Madeleine St John
Download or read book A Stairway to Paradise written by Madeleine St John and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex and Andrew are friends. And Barbara...Barbara is a goddess. Here is the eternal triangle, the story of three people in an unhappy tangle of emotions, none able to articulate the precise quality of their longing and dissatisfaction. Are any of them truly interested in reaching the ‘paradise’ they claim to be seeking, or are they actually trying to avoid it? In St. John’s hands, what is commonplace is transformed and transcendent. This is the work of an extraordinary writer. MADELEINE ST JOHN was born in Sydney in 1941. Her father, Edward, was a barrister and Liberal politician. Her mother, Sylvette, committed suicide in 1954, when Madeleine was twelve. Her death, she later said, ‘obviously changed everything’. St John studied Arts at Sydney University, where her contemporaries included Bruce Beresford, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes. In 1965 she married Chris Tillam, a fellow student, and they moved to the United States where they first attended Stanford and later Cambridge. From Cambridge, St John relocated to London in 1968 with the hope that Chris would follow. The couple did not reunite and the marriage ended. St John settled in Notting Hill. She worked at a series of odd jobs, and then, in 1993, published her first novel, The Women in Black, the only book she set in Australia. When her third novel, The Essence of the Thing (1997), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she became the first Australian woman to receive this honour. St John died in 2006. She had been so incensed after seeing errors in a French edition of one of her novels that she stipulated in her will that there were to be no more translations of her work. ‘Not much in the way of folly escapes Madeleine St John, and the oubliette she opens into the darker reaches of the spirit is unsettling.’ The Times ‘St John proves herself a comic, humane observer.’ Newsday ‘Madeleine St John is brilliant on the elliptical way lovers talk to each other.’ Daily Telegraph
Download or read book Hills End written by Ivan Southall and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1962, Hills End is regarded as a turning point in Australian children's literature, paving the way for much subsequent Australian adventure fiction. On a fateful day in Hills End, a timber-milling town in the mountains of Victoria, seven children and their teacher set off to explore caves in the nearby mountains said to contain ancient Aboriginal rock art. While they are deep inside the mountain caves a storm of tremendous violence all but sweeps the town away and threatens to leave them stranded on the mountain. Tackling flooded creeks and washed out paths and fallen trees, the children make their way back to Hills End injured and exhausted, only to face a new battle to survive in the denuded town. Ivan Southall was the first Australian author to receive the Carnergie Medal, and was awarded the Australian Children's Books Council Book of the Year on three occasions. He wrote over 60 books in his lifetime and has been published in 23 different countries. He died in 2008. textclassics.com.au 'The author has the power to get inside his characters, and through them express his faith in human nature in the goodness of man...a solid work, strong in action, mood and discipline.' New York Times 'A book that has haunted me for years.' Ramona Koval, By the Book 'I would highly recommend this novel for both children and adults as the vivid imagery which Southall creates is something which is not as prominent in today's literature. I believe that it is important for young people to read books like this as they encourage a love for the written word, something which is often neglected these days.' ReadPlus review blog
Download or read book Kangaroo written by D. H. Lawrence and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark D. H. Lawrence novel, considered to be among the best writing about Australia.
Book Synopsis Honour & Other People’s Children by : Helen Garner
Download or read book Honour & Other People’s Children written by Helen Garner and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two novellas about the deep connections we forge with the people we love, and the pain of breaking those connections. In Honour, Kathleen and Frank are amicably separated, in contact through shared parenting of their young daughter, Flo. But when Frank finds a new partner and wants a divorce, Kathleen is hurt. And Flo can’t understand why they all can’t live together. In Other People’s Children, Ruth and Scotty live in a big share house that’s breaking up. Scotty is trying to hold on, remembering the early days of telling life stories and laughter and singing—and when the kids were everyone’s kids. But now the bitterness has crept in and their friendship is broken. Ruth is ready to move on—and she’ll take her kids with her. Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. Her book of essays Everywhere I Look won the 2017 Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction. ‘Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life’s secular apocalypses...her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive.’ James Wood, New Yorker ‘She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all.’ Weekend Australian ‘Helen Garner’s collections of fiction and non-fiction corroborate her reputation as a great stylist and a great witness.’ Peter Craven, Australian
Download or read book Reaching Tin River written by Thea Astley and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tin River is a townlet of terminal attractiveness. Tin River is a state of mind. Researching in the archives Belle discovers the long-dead Gaden Lockyer, a colonial pioneer in Jericho Flats, and soon becomes obsessed. Belle’s quest for Lockyer is her way of coming to terms with the past—her mother, ‘a drummer in her own all-women’s group’; her absent American father; and her ineffectual husband, Seb. In Reaching Tin River, Thea Astley’s satire is at its sharpest and most entertaining. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘How lucidly Ms. Astley evokes for us Australia's rough pioneer history and Belle's love for it...You will like this journey, I promise, and when it is over you will wish it weren't, and you will feel cross and want from Ms. Astley much, much more.’ New York Times ‘Dazzling imagery on every page...Beautifully written.’ Publishers Weekly ‘Intelligent, fresh, and new.’ Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book A Kindness Cup written by Thea Astley and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I told them to go into the scrub and disperse the tribe. Disperse? That is a strange word. What do you mean by dispersing? Firing at them. Two decades after a massacre of local Aboriginal people, the former residents of a Queensland town have reunited to celebrate the progress and prosperity of their community. Tom Dorahy, returning to his hometown, is having none of it: he wants those responsible to own up to their actions. A reckoning with oppression, guilt and the weight of the past, A Kindness Cup is one of Thea Astley’s greatest achievements. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘Smart, compassionate.’ New York Times ‘One of the earliest and most empathetic postwar engagements by a white Australian writer with the horrors of nineteenth-century racial violence.’ Australian Book Review ‘This timely and attractively priced reissue is a welcome chance to reconsider [Astley’s] rich oeuvre. Astley’s work is characterised by her irony and unflinching scrutiny of social injustice. In A Kindness Cup, she was at the top of her impressive form...This short novel is one of Australia’s finest.’ Stuff NZ
Download or read book The Dyehouse written by Mena Calthorpe and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written with unerring skill and insight, The Dyehouse is a masterly portrait of postwar Australia, when industrial work was radically transformed by new technologies and society changed with it. Mena Calthorpe—who herself worked in a textile factory—takes us inside this world, vividly bringing to life the people of an inner-Sydney company in the mid-1950s: the bosses, middlemen and underlings; their dramatic struggles and their loves. This powerful and affecting novel was first published in 1961, and is the hundredth book in the Text Classics series. The new edition comes with an introduction by Fiona McFarlane, acclaimed author of The Night Guest. Mena Calthorpe was born in Goulburn, New South Wales, in 1905, and grew up there. After marrying, Calthorpe moved to Sydney and lived for most of her life in the Sutherland Shire. Working in office jobs and writing in her spare time, she was active in literary groups and in the Labor Party—for some years she was a member of the Communist Party, and she opposed B. A. Santamaria’s attempts to stop communism in trade unions. The Dyehouse (1961) was followed by The Defectors (1969), which dramatised unions’ internal power struggles. Mena Calthorpe’s third and final novel was The Plain of Ala, an Irish migrant story, which was published in 1989. She died in 1996. ‘[The Dyehouse] is executed with a singular combination of charm, grace and tough-mindedness.’ Meanjin ‘The Dyehouse is an extraordinary book—a true ensemble novel, written with astonishing control and animated by compassionate intelligence. With its indelible Sydney setting, it deserves—more than deserves—to take its place among the great Australian novels about work, and to be celebrated as the 100th Text Classic.’ Fiona McFarlane ‘A reminder of how rarely these days fiction tackles the world of work that so dominates our lives...Worth reading as much for its social history and its understanding of human nature as its rendering of the labour/capital clash.’ Australian ‘Vivid, fresh and utterly unsentimental...Re-reading The Dyehouse now I am struck by how technically accomplished it is, and how each of its many characters is made distinct and alive with extraordinary economy...Calthorpe's own experience of factory and office work provides The Dyehouse with many authentic touches (including much detail about the dyeing process) but that is not what generates this novel's compelling power. What is so remarkable is how it captures and presents a microcosmic world, in which the human elements are all parts of a moving whole.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘The Dyehouse has themes that are as true today as they were at the time of writing...Beautifully written.’ Booksellers New Zealand ‘A masterly portrait of post-war Australia...vividly bringing to life the people of an inner-Sydney company in the mid-1950s.’ Womankind ‘The Dyehouse is the perfect novel for the Text Classics centenary. It’s a shining example of a book ‘we’ve never heard of’ that is very good reading indeed...I started reading The Dyehouse last night when I went to bed at 10 o’clock. I became so absorbed in it, that I didn’t turn the light out till four o’clock in the morning. That speaks for itself, I think!’ ANZ LitLovers ‘Fresh and lively...I really can’t recommend this book enough.’ Whispering Gums ‘[A] fascinating novel of women and work.’ Australian Women’s Weekly
Download or read book The Chantic Bird written by David Ireland and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-25 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chantic Bird is the confession of a teenage anarchist, who combines a contempt for contemporary society with a great tenderness and warmth for his younger siblings and for Bee, the girl who looks after them. The first of David Ireland's masterful novels, The Chantic Bird contains the same characteristic indictment of the bovine mindlessness of collective humanity, and the home-owning wage slaves. This edition of The Chantic Bird comes with a new introduction by Geordie Williamson. David Ireland was born in 1927 in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future. David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagull. 'One of the most remarkable novels - first, fifth or fifteenth - to appear on the scene for many a long day...Compassionate and pitiless, savage and sad, ironic and naive, horrifying and farcical.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Gloriously and savagely comic.' Adelaide Advertiser
Download or read book Tourmaline written by Randolph Stow and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no stretch of land on earth more ancient than this. And so it is blunt and red and barren, littered with the fragments of broken mountains, flat, waterless. Tourmaline, in outback Western Australia, is dying: its mines lie abandoned and drought has taken hold. When the enigmatic diviner Michael Random emerges from the desert, desperate townspeople see him as a messiah. Random begins to spread the word of God—and to promise them water, that most precious resource. Both a complex spiritual parable and an enduring apocalyptic vision, Tourmaline is Randolph Stow’s most controversial novel. Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished. He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite. For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’. Praise for Tourmaline ‘Intense and extraordinary.’ Spectator ‘Brilliantly evocative...disturbing.’ Meanjin ‘A member of the Australian literary triumvirate that included Patrick White and Christina Stead, Stow was an original, and this is an unsung 1963 classic with which to reckon.’ Favourite Fiction and Non-Fiction of 2016, Irish Times
