Patrick White

Patrick White was born in London to Australian parents on 28 May 1912 and died in Sydney on 30 September 1990. His biography and list of publications and awards may be found on:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1973/white/biographical/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Patrick-White

Patrick White published 12 novels, three short-story collections, and eight plays, from 1935 to 1987. He received the inaugural Miles Franklin Award for Voss (1957) and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 for The Tree of Man (1955). He also received many other Australian awards, including Australian of the Year in 1974 and Companion of the Order of Australia in 1975.

The novels the our group collectively read were:
Happy Valley, 1939
The Tree of Man, 1955
Voss, 1957
Riders in the Chariot, 1961
The Eye of the Storm, 1973
A Fringe of Leaves, 1976
The Hanging Gardens (2012) (Posthumous)

And the short story collection:
The Cockatoos (1974)

And his autobiography
The Hanging Gardens (2012) (Posthumous)
(1981)

Our collective thoughts on his writing included that he was deeply concerned about men’s sense of isolation and their search for meaning. He used humour, flowery prose, shifting narrative vantage viewpoints and a stream of consciousness techniques. We all loved his use of language, even when things were stated sparsely. His early books were well acclaimed internationally but not always in Australia. There were several themes in his books including passion, suicide and asthma which he suffered from. He described well the Australian landscapes and described unsparingly the people who live in them. White continued the Australian themes which we had met in books by other Australian authors – the drudgery of dairy farming, poverty, droughts, floods, fires and the outsider.