Remembering Babylon

Synopsis

In the mid-1840s, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them.

Author Biography

David Malouf was born in Queensland, Australia, in March 1934 to a Lebanese-Christian father and English-Jewish mother.

He graduated from the University of Queensland in 1955 and lectured for a short period before moving to London, where he taught at Holland Park Comprehensive School and in Birkenhead. He returned to Australia in 1968 and lectured at the University of Sydney before becoming a full-time writer in 1978.

In 2008, Malouf won the Australian Publishers Association’s Lloyd O’Neil Award for outstanding service to the Australian book industry. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.

David Malouf lives in Sydney.