David Malouf has often acknowledged his preoccupations with issues of national identity and with what it means to be “Australian” – or, indeed, to be of any nationality – in a postcolonial world. However, although the construction of myths of nationhood resonates frequently throughout his work in a range of literary disciplines, to describe Malouf as merely a “postcolonial” writer would be to ignore the increasingly broad thematic scope he has displayed throughout his career.
David George Joseph Malouf was born in 1934 in Brisbane, Australia – the city which forms the physical and cultural backdrop to much of his writing. His father was Lebanese Christian and his mother English Jewish, and this multiculturalism, mixed in with the inherited self-conscious anxiety of the
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Citation: Dunlop, Nicholas. "David Malouf". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 February 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2900, accessed 04 May 2024.]
