Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war.He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

"[An] exploration of an extremely slippery characterological realm offers many substantial pleasures" -- Benjamin DeMott New York Times "It challenges comparison with some of the world's most bizarre masterpieces" Financial Times "Patrick White is, in the finest sense, a world novelist. His themes are catholic and complex and he persues them with a single-minded energy and vision" -- Robert Nye Guardian