Blanche D’Alpuget

Blanche d’Alpuget grew up in Sydney, an only child. Her father wanted Blanche to become a marine biologist and find in the sea a new source of food for humanity. On her 21st birthday she sailed to England and traveled for the next nine years, spending most time in Indonesia. By her return, Blanche was married and had a baby son. They lived in Canberra. As Blanche wanted to stay close to her son and knew she had a wealth of exotic anecdotes, rather than taking a newspaper job, she decided to try her hand at writing. Her husband generously supported her.

Luck came when Sir Richard Kirby, chief justice of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, asked Blanche if she’d be interested in writing his biography. He had worked in Indonesia at the end of WWII. Blanche knew nothing of industrial law, but loved research and Kirby loved mentoring. The first publisher she approached, the prestigious Melbourne University Press, accepted it. She re-wrote her Indonesian novel (Monkeys in the Dark) and found a publisher immediately. Until then, she had described herself as a housewife. Once two books were published she realized she had “a difficult but joyous career”. Writing was bliss.

Blanche’s next novel was Turtle Beach (made into what she and others consider a rather dreadful movie, but one still shown on cable TV).

She had learned a lot about industrial law and the trade unions for the biography of Sir Richard. Blanche decided on a biography of the leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, whom she’d met years earlier (in Indonesia), a swashbuckling folk hero called Bob Hawke. At the time she began research he decided he wanted to run for Parliament. There was only one job he wanted: the Prime Minister’s.

Blanche finished his biography a few months before the general election. When he became Prime Minister, her book rocketed. She hated the loss of anonymity and left for Israel, a country she’d visited for research, thinking it offered enticing potential for a novel.

In 1995 Bob Hawke, with whom Blanche had had a love affair, married her. The news media forgot she was a novelist whose books were read around the world. It re-badged her “Bob’s biographer”. Her years of writing were air-brushed away. Life in a glass house began. Blanche and Bob were a cynosure for Peeping Toms (re-badged ‘photographers’). The couple spent the next 15 years establishing a consulting company, traveling, enjoying plenty of razzle-dazzle and doing charity work.

In 2008 the new publisher of Melbourne University Press, Louise Adler, asked Blanche to write an essay. She wrote On Longing, built on feelings that had arisen from her mother’s death. Louise next asked her to update her biography of Bob Hawke to cover his years as Prime Minister. By the time that book was finished she had rediscovered the bliss of writing and had a topic for a series of historical novels: Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the glorious 12th century. Blanche had been interested in this era since her twenties.

The first novel, The Young Lion, was published in September 2013. Links to it can be found on the Harper Collins website. It was judged one of the most desirable books of 2013. The second book in the series, The Lion Rampant, appeared in 2014 to critical acclaim. Thomas Keneally said, “This is fresh and invigorating and absolutely gripping. The revision she provides of the motives and character of Thomas Becket will rivet readers as they have not been riveted since Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell.” She completed the third of the series in late 2015, but has held it back from publishing until she finishes the quartet, in early 2017. Many readers of the first two books have written asking “Where’s the next one?” Her answer is, “The whole four should be available in late 2017.” The quartet will be subtitled “The birth of the Plantagenets.”

All Blanche’s novels are in print and e-books. Her biography of Hawke is now published as two books because it was too big to have as one. They are Hawke: the Early Years and Hawke, the Prime Minister.