Australian Literature - Other Contemporary Works and Authors

Other Contemporary Works and Authors

Patrick White became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature". He published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays. J. M. Coetzee who was born in South Africa and was resident there when awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, now lives in Adelaide, South Australia, and is an Australian citizen.

Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, 1977, is Australia's highest selling novel and one the biggest selling novels of all time - with around 30 million copies sold by 2009.

A prolific writer of global renown has been Thomas Keneally whose notable works include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1972 and Schindler's Ark, 1982. This latter work was the inspiration for the film Schindler's List. Other notable Australian novels converted to celluloid include: Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape; Pamela Lyndon Travers' Mary Poppins; Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman and Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One.

Careful, He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliott won the Miles Franklin Award in 1963, and was the subject of a 1983 Australian film. Author David Ireland won the Miles Franklin Award three times, including for The Glass Canoe (1976). Peter Carey has also won the Miles Franklin Award three times (Jack Maggs 1998; Oscar and Lucinda 1989; and Bliss 1981). He has twice won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction with 1988's Oscar and Lucinda and 2001's True History of the Kelly Gang. DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize in 2003.

Other notable writers to have emerged since the 1970s include Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Helen Garner, Janette Turner Hospital, Marion Halligan, Susan Johnson, Christopher Koch, Alex Miller, Shirley Hazzard, Richard Flanagan, Gerald Murnane, Brenda Walker, Rod Jones and Tim Winton.

James Clavell in The Asian Saga discusses an important feature of Australian literature: its portrayal of far eastern culture, from the admittedly even further east, but nevertheless western cultural viewpoint, as Nevil Shute did. Clavell was also a successful screenwriter and along with such writers as Thomas Keneally, who won the Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark (the book upon which the movie Schindler's List is based), has expanded the topics of Australian literature far beyond that one country. Other novelists to use international themes are David Malouf, Beverley Farmer and Rod Jones.

The Secret River (2005) is an historical fiction by Kate Grenville imagining encounters between Aboriginal and colonial Australia which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Slap (2008) was an internationally successful novel by Christos Tsiolkas which was adapted for television by ABC1 in 2011, and was described in a review by Gerard Windsor as "something of an anatomy of the rising Australian middle class".