Last week, one of our grand old men of Australian letters, David Malouf, died. He has been such a presence in our literary landscape since the mid-1970s, that, despite all that has been written and said over the last few days, it would feel disrespectful to let the occasion of his death pass. And, anyhow, I don’t want to – let it pass, I mean.

Ten years ago, I wrote one of my Spotlight posts on him. It justifies, I think, my “grand old man” epithet, so I will repeat what I said there – and then some! Malouf wrote in multiple forms – novels, short stories, poetry, essays and criticism, memoir, even libretti – and was critically acclaimed in all. This is no mean feat. There is an extensive list of his national and international accolades at Wikipedia. They include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a Miles Franklin Award, the Australia-Asia Literary Award, a Commonwealth Writers Prize, a Pascall Prize for critical writing, and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He also gave the annual Boyer Lectures in 1998 (with the topic “A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness”). Sian Cain, in his obituary for The Guardian, added that Malouf was a passionate supporter of Opera Australia, Adelaide Writers Week, and the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. I always saw him as a serious contender for a Nobel Prize, but that book has closed.

Although Malouf published his last novel, Ransom (my review), in 2009, he continued producing poetry, essays and short stories. His last published book was his 2018 poetry collection, An open book. However, because I mostly review novels, and because I only started my blog in 2009, I have not reviewed him as much as I’d have liked.  But, I have mentioned him often. This tag link captures my main mentions, but there are many others.

I have read six of his nine novels: his semi-autobiographical novel, Johnno (1975), An imaginary life (1978, the favourite of many), Fly away Peter (1982, one of my all-time favourite novellas), Remembering Babylon (1993), The conversations at Curlow Creek (1996, one of his least popular, but another favourite of mine), and, of course, Ransom. In other words, I’ve read his first three novels and his last three, but not the three in the middle!

These works, as I remember them, reflect a calm, measured intensity. In my Spotlight post, which drew on an interview Malouf had with Annette Marfording, I shared some of his thoughts about Patrick White. He believed that White achieved two things which paved the way for writers after him. These were that White showed that “an Australian life could be of significance” and not just in Australia but more generally, and that

he made it possible for you to write a novel in which the major interest was the interior, not really on action, but on what was going on in people’s heads.

I have “seen” Malouf three times – twice for launches of books (The great world, in 1990 before blogging, and Ransom, see my post) and once when he was sitting in the foyer of the National Library of Australia. I had one of those fan-girl moments, as in, should I or shouldn’t I go over and say something. Then, I remembered that Kate Grenville had once told me that authors love to hear readers say they enjoy their books. So, I went over to him, and told him how much I loved his writing – I can’t recollect exactly what I said – and left him alone. He was gracious, but I have no idea whether he did like being approached.

Selected thoughts from others …

So much has been written, or published about Malouf since his death, but I will just point you to a few. Two were particularly personal and help explain the man. One is a blog post, Remembering David Malouf, by Jonathan at Me fail? I fly! He was taught by Malouf at university and had various encounters with him over the years. I loved Jonathan’s anecdotes for the delightful insights they give into the human being behind the writer. I could share some of them, but really, you should just read the post yourselves and enjoy Jonathan’s telling.

The other was an article written around his 90th birthday in March 2024 by author Susan Johnson, for The Monthly (This might be paywalled, but I think there are ways of accessing it without subscribing.) She visited him in his apartment in one of the most incongruous places you could think of for David Malouf, Surfers Paradise. It’s partly one of those cosy artist-at-home articles, but it also contains some little jewels, such as this on what drives him:

It’s opera and art – and above all, literature and the imagination – that sustains David Malouf. It is his great, over-arching enthusiasm for everything between heaven and earth that a man or a woman can create from the stuff of life that propels him.

Other pieces I have read about him in the last few days include one from literary editor, Jason Steger, in his weekly Herald Booklist email (24/4/2026). He offers more insights into Malouf, but again I’ll just choose one. It concerns “the novel to which he was most devoted”, which I think interests us readers, doesn’t it? That novel is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which he apparently tried to read almost every year. Steger shares some comments Malouf made about Moby-Dick some years ago in The Age, when talking about his “cultural turning points”. Malouf described Moby-Dick as

an anthology, in short, of man’s meeting with man, with the animal kingdom; of nature and its use (or misuse) in what was then America’s largest industry; of man’s meeting with the divine. All in a language of the highest eloquence and at times of the most mischievous, sometimes erotic, sometimes blasphemous play.

I started my post by referring to Malouf as a “man of letters”. Brigid Rooney also described him that way in her article in The Conversation a couple of days ago. She explained it thus:

He was in every sense a man of letters. He was a great reader and profoundly erudite. He was a sociable, assured and generous contributor to literary and public conversation. These same qualities imbue his writerly voice, his regular invocation of a communal “us” or “we”. His intimacy of address marks his poetry and prose, inviting trust and drawing in readers.

This is how he came across to those of us who only knew him through his books. He was a reassuring presence in the best meaning of that phrase, someone you felt was oh so intelligent but generous and compassionate in his world-view. We will miss him.

Vale David Malouf.