Riders in the Chariot

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PATRICK WHITE (1912–1990) was born in London and traveled to Sydney with his Australian parents six months later. White was a solitary, precocious, asthmatic child and at thirteen was sent to an English boarding school, a miserable experience. At eighteen he returned to Australia and worked as a jackaroo on an isolated sheep station. Two years later, he went up to Cambridge, settling afterwards in London, where he published his first two books. White joined the RAF in 1940 and served as an intelligence officer in the Middle East. At war's end, he and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, bought an old house in a Sydney suburb, where they lived with their four Schnauzers. For the next eighteen years, the two men farmed their six acres while White worked on some of his finest novels, including _The Tree of Man__ (1955), _Voss__ (1957), and _Riders in the Chariot__ (1961). When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973, he did not attend the ceremony but, with his takings and some of his own money, created an award to help older writers who hadn't received their due: the first recipient was Christina Stead. Late in life, when asked for a list of his loves, White responded: "Silence, the company of friends, unexpected honesty, reading, going to the pictures, dreams, uncluttered landscapes, city streets, faces, good food, cooking small meals, whisky, sex, pugs, the thought of an Australian republic, my ashes floating off at last."

DAVID MALOUF was born in Brisbane, Australia. His novels include _An Imaginary Life__ (1978), _The Great World__ (1990), and _Remembering Babylon__ (1993), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His latest collection of stories, _Dream Stuff__, was published in 2000. He lives in Sydney.