Patrick White

Patrick Victor Martindale White (London, 1912 – Sydney, 1990) was an Anglo-Australian novelist and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 and remains the only Australian to receive it. Writing in English, he brought a dense, psychologically intense fiction born on a continent that had previously had little presence in world letters to the attention of international readers.

Born in London while his affluent Australian parents were visiting Europe, he returned to Sydney as a baby and spent his childhood there and on the family's rural properties. Asthma kept him often isolated and absent from school. At thirteen he was sent to Cheltenham College in England, where he was unhappy, but where he discovered the theatre and reading and decided he wanted to be a writer rather than a grazier or diplomat. After a brief spell as a jackaroo on New South Wales sheep stations, he studied modern languages at King's College, Cambridge, reading Joyce, Lawrence and Proust, whose influence shaped his style.

After university he settled in London, supported for a time by his father. His first novel, Happy Valley (1939), was well received, though his reputation grew more firmly with later books. During the Second World War he served as an intelligence officer with the Royal Air Force in the Middle East and Greece, where he met Manoly Lascaris, who became his lifelong companion. In 1948 the two returned to Australia and settled on the outskirts of Sydney.

His work departs from the realism that dominated Australian fiction of the period. His characters are often visionary or marginal figures set against a materialistic, conformist society, and his recurring themes include religious experience, personal identity and the difficulty of expressing inner life. The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) brought him wide international acclaim, especially in the United States and Britain, while local critics remained sharply divided. In the 1960s and 1970s he also wrote plays that had a major impact on Australian theatre, and from the late 1960s he became publicly involved in causes such as opposition to the Vietnam War and Aboriginal self-determination.

His legacy lies in the expansion of Australian literature. The prize money from the Nobel funded the Patrick White Literary Awards, which support writers whose work has not yet received the recognition it deserves; past recipients include Christina Stead, Randolph Stow, Thea Astley and Gerald Murnane. White died in Sydney in 1990 after a long illness.