Patrick White

Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) was an Australian novelist and playwright who explored themes of religious experience, personal identity and the conflict between visionary individuals and a materialistic, conformist society. Influenced by the modernism of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, he developed a complex literary style and a body of work that challenged the dominant realist prose tradition of his home country, was satirical of Australian society, and sharply divided local critics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 and is the only Australian to receive it.

Born in London to affluent Australian parents, White spent his childhood in Sydney and on his family's rural properties. He was sent to an English public school at the age of 13, and went on to read modern languages at Cambridge. After graduating in 1935 he embarked on a literary career. His first published novel, Happy Valley (1939), was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society. In World War II he served as an intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force. While stationed in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1941, he met Manoly Lascaris, who became his life companion and, as White later wrote, "the central mandala in my life's hitherto messy design."

In 1948 White returned to Australia, where he bought a small farm on the outskirts of Sydney. There he wrote the two novels, The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957), that brought him critical acclaim in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the 1960s he wrote the novels Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Solid Mandala (1966), and a series of plays, including The Season at Sarsaparilla and A Cheery Soul, that had a major impact on Australian theatre.

White and Lascaris moved to Sydney's Centennial Park in 1964. From the late 1960s White became increasingly involved in public affairs, opposing the Vietnam War and supporting Aboriginal self-determination, nuclear disarmament and environmental causes. His later work includes the novels The Eye of the Storm (1973) and The Twyborn Affair (1979) and the memoir Flaws in the Glass (1981).