The Eye of the Storm

About the Author

Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months old, but 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 He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the Second World War. He returned after the war to Australia, where he became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature before being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. Technically brilliant, he is a modern novelist of whom the epithet ‘visionary’ can safely be applied. Patrick White died in September 1990. In 2012, Knopf will publish The Hanging Garden. Handwritten in 1982 it had remained untranscribed, until now.