Patrick White (1912–1990)

Patrick White was born in London to wealthy Australian parents who had come to England for his birth. He was taken back to Australia at six months, educated in England, served in the Second World War, and returned to Australia in 1948, apparently permanently.

He felt he had returned to a country that did not have the literary language to describe itself — flat, dismissive, suspicious of interiority. He spent his life proving this was wrong, by writing novels that went so deep into the Australian landscape and the Australian mind that the landscape became a form of psychology.

Voss follows a German explorer attempting to cross the Australian continent in the nineteenth century. The continent defeats him. It does not do so with violence. It does so with its relentless refusal to be what a European mind requires it to be.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1973, the only Australian to do so. He used the prize money to establish a literary award for young Australian writers.

He gave no Nobel Lecture and did not come to Stockholm. The painter Sidney Nolan read his speech (1973), which remembers a visit to the city at sixteen — where, he admits, he drank his first glass of wine. Read it at NobelPrize.org.