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Introducing Canadian Novels

   Like other literary forms, early and many later novels were often concerned with the 'quintessential' Australian qualities: convicts, the bush, bushrangers, folklore, tales of pioneering, family sagas, floods, droughts, bushfires, battlers, Aboriginal people, Irishmen and lost children.Early Australian novelists included: Marcus Clarke, Miles Franklin, Clarence (Clarrie or Den) Michael James Stanislaus (CJ) Dennis, Edward Dyson and Doris Pilkington. The slow, or non-existent, rate of publication did not deter them from continuing to write their poems, books and plays.

A new breed of writers was born in the 20th century. They redefined what could be expected from writing even if they used the same backdrop of the bush as early writers had done. Published in 1901, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin is often said to be the first authentic Australian novel.The most eminent fiction writer after 1945 was Patrick White, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. In a dozen novels from Happy Valley (1939) to Memoirs of Many in One (1986), White examined, often satirically, the conflict between inner consciousness and social existen

In the Miles Franklin tradition, other novelists, particularly the women, relied upon both social realism and also a surreal or imaginary life linked to the everyday lives of their characters.

Christina Stead’s (1902 - 1983) highly praised novel The Man Who Loved Children appeared in 1940. Ruth Park (b. 1922)'s most famous books are the trilogy of Missus, The Harp in the South and Poor Man's Orange, along with Swords and Crowns and Rings which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1977. The Newspaper of Claremont Street: a Novel by Elizabeth Jolley (1923 - 2007) relates the story of an old cleaning woman known as The Newspaper, who dreams of escape from the parasitic demands of both her past and her present.

These were followed by David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1996) which was considered by the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award judges to be the best novel written by “anyone, anywhere, in any language, in the last three years”.Richard Flanagan's (b. 1961, Tasmania) three novels  adopted a similar form with great lucidity.  

                Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang, which evokes the tradition of literary nationalism and the imaginary life of Ned Kelly, was short-listed for the 2001 Miles Franklin Award and won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the 2001 Man Booker Prize.Thomas Michael Keneally  (born 7 October 1935)-Australian novelist, playwright  and author of non-fiction- is best known for writi   Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of   Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor The book was later adapted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.


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