David Malouf is a distinguished Brisbane-born author, essayist and librettist. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Miles Franklin Award and the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He is best known for Johnno (1975), An Imaginary Life (1978),Remembering Babylon (Chatto and Windus, 1993) and the1998 Boyer Lectures, A Spirit of Play (ABC Books, 1998).

His father’s family came to Australia in the 1880s from Lebanon and his mother’s family from London just before World War I. He was educated at Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland, where he taught for two years after graduating.

He left Australia aged twenty-four and lived in Britain from 1959-68 where he taught in London and Birkenhead.He returned to teach English at the University of Sydney, where he stayed until 1977. He now writes full-time and lives part of the year in Australia and part in southern Tuscany in Italy.