FRANK MOORHOUSE AM was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in the 1970s became a full-time writer. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays and edited many collections of writing. He has won major Australian national prizes for the short story, the novel, the essay, and for script writing. His work has been published in the United Kingdom, France and the United States and also translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian, and Swedish. He has also undertaken numerous writing fellowships. Moorhouse was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997. In 2001 he received the Centenary Medal for service to Australian society through writing. Moorhouse is perhaps best known for winning the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel Dark Palace which together with Grand Days and Cold Light, 'the Edith Trilogy', is a fictional account of the League of Nations. Grand Days won the South Australian Premier's Award for Fiction and, as well as winning the 2001 Miles Franklin Award, Dark Palace was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award. Cold Light won the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards in 2012 and was shortlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Moorhouse's novel Forty-Seventeen (1988) was named 1988 Book of the Year by the Age and won the 1988 Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal. His novel The Electrical Experience (1974) won the 1975 National Award for Fiction. His book, The Drover's Wife, was published in 2017 by Random House.
