David Malouf

David George Joseph Malouf is an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright and librettist.

His writing is characterised by a heightened sense of spatial relations, from the physical environments into which he takes his readers—whether within or outside built spaces, or in a natural landscape. He has likened each of his succession of novels to the discovery and exploration of a new room in a house, rather than part of an overarching development. “At a certain point, you begin to see what the connections are between things, and you begin to know what space it is you are exploring.” From his first novel Johnno onwards, his themes focused on “male identity and soul-searching”.

He said that much of the male writing that preceded him “was about the world of action. I don’t think that was ever an accurate description of men’s lives”.[6] He identified Patrick White as the writer who turned this around in Australian literature—that White’s writing was the kind “that goes behind inarticulacy and or unwillingness to speak, writing that gives the language of feeling to people who don’t have it themselves.