DEBATE surrounded the mixed bag shortlist and the wisdom, never mind the ethics, of offering £100,000 for one novel, but the inaugural International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, announced in Dublin earlier this week, produced a worthy winner in David Malouf for Remembering Babylon.
Born in Brisbane in 1934, Malouf, a lyric artist with a mythic vision and understanding of place and time, is also the author of Johnno (1975), An Imaginary Life (1978), Fly Away Peter (1982), Hadand's Half Acre (1984) and The Great World (1990); five collections of poetry and three opera libretti.
One of Australia's most distinguished writers, he is the literary successor of Patrick White. His father's family arrived in Australia during the 1880s from Lebanon, while his mother's people were south London fruit dealers, settling in Australia shortly before the first World War.
Malouf's paternal grandparents spoke Arabic throughout his childhood and while themes of exile, alienation and the transposing of cultures dominate his work, his own mixed heritage has left him surprisingly unconfused despite his strongly Levantine appearance: "I was born in Queensland, I grew up in Brisbane, my father was born in Australia, I see myself as absolutely Australian."
A slight man, he has a smooth, brown, bird like face and small, bright, dark brown eyes. He is soft spoken, intense, gentle and extremely courtly in demeanour.
He responds to questions in a thoughtful, careful way, yet the precise formality of his answers is softened by his characteristic tone of excited interest. "I do want to write about all human experience and about creation itself, from the stars to the ants." He is also widely read and is an astute reader critic.
This former university lecturer became a full time writer on the publication of his superb second novel, An Imaginary Life, a dramatic monologue in which the exiled poet Ovid tells the story of a wolf boy.
Malouf is proud of the international emergence of Australian literature and the fact that Australian writers no longer look towards England as the world centre of English language writing: "We don't have to see ourselves as writing on the periphery, we are closer to Canadian, US and New Zealand writing."
Malouf continues to attribute much of Australia's literary success to the powerful influence of the 1973 Nobel Literature Laureate, Patrick White (1912-90). "He is just so important. He is the figure to get around, because he's so often been there before you. Before White, we had a tradition of realistic narrative. He allowed young Australians to write - if they wanted to - in the way Faulkner did about the inner lives of people."
Malouf is interested in writing about "what's going on in the complex inner life of people who are not necessarily articulate".
The often difficult yet generous White personally encouraged Malouf. White's The Tree of Man (1954), the Australian Book of Genesis, is a literary ancestor of Remembering Babylon. Both novels explore the first act of settlement in Australia.
His 20 years spent as an academic never affected Malouf's clear eyed vision of his early years in a modest, one storeyed weatherboard house on Brisbane's somewhat dubious Edmondstone Street. His parents, he recalls, were "more like older children playing mothers and fathers than real adults".
The household was a passive cultural battlefield of sorts before he was born, Malouf's paternal grandfather openly despairing of his three unmarried daughters as they decided to embrace Catholicism. Meanwhile, considering himself above employment, he gardened and "stuck to his old men and his tales from the Arabian nights".
Malouf's father was the first of that family to be born in Australia and he had quickly become a clean cut Catholic boy working for the St Vincent de Paul on Saturday mornings.
Conscious of the many hardships his father suffered, David Malouf has written of him: "He was not much of a talker, our father. He seldom told us things unless we asked. Then he would answer our questions too carefully, as if he feared, with his own lack of schooling, he might lead us wrong.
"And he never told us stories, as our mother did, of his family and youth. His family were there to be seen, and however strange they might be in fact, they did, not lend themselves to fairytale.
My father had gone out to work at 12. If he never spoke of his youth it was, perhaps, because he had never had one."
Malouf's interest in books came indirectly from his mother who was intent on creating an England within her home. She and Cassie, the family maid, took turns in reading the Victorian novels she had read as a girl in England to the children; books such as Jane Eyre and David Copperfield - the source of the young Malouf's Christian name.
He first left Australia when he "was 23 and spent 10 years teaching in England before returning to a job at Sydney University. On becoming a full time writer, he also began dividing his time between home and Tuscany.
Remembering Babylon was shortlisted for both the 1993 Booker Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. He has won many prizes in Australia as well as the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger in 1991. But recognition means more to Malouf than money. "I'm not a person who is likely to go out and buy a big car", he said earlier this week, pointing out that in Australia literary prizes are taxed as income.
His new novel, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, is published in September and could well make the Booker shortlist.
