David Malouf has written that he was "born and grew up in Edwardian England, a fact that has somehow got itself recorded in the real world as Brisbane, Australia, in 1934." The son of a Lebanese Christian and an English Jew of Portuguese descent, he came of age at a time when Australia patterned itself entirely on English lines: "I lived on the beach, surfing, swimming, active, in a place with a particular kind of light, a particular kind of moisture in the air, a particular sky. Everything local belonged to the sensory world. But everything cultural was English. Until 20 or 30 years ago everyone was still referring to England as 'home.'" That paradox has preoccupied much of Malouf's fiction, which in turn has inspired two generations of Australian writers.

Known as a poet and librettist as well as a novelist, Malouf is the author of 14 books, including An Imaginary Life, Fly Away Peter, Harland's Half Acre, Antipodes, and the international bestseller The Great World. His work has been awarded the Pascall Prize, the Miles Franklin Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the New South Wales and Victorian Premier's Award in Australia, along with the Commonwealth Prize and France's Prix Femina Etranger. Remembering Babylon was nominated for the 1993 Booker Prize. David Malouf lives in Brisbane, Australia.

Books by David Malouf

Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old British cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later he moves back into the world of Europeans. His own identity in this new world is as unsettling to him as the knowledge he brings to others of the savage, the aboriginal.