Rodney Hall OAM is an author with an international reputation. His books have been published in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia, also in translation into German, French, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
He has had 14 novels published, 11 collections of poems, a collection of short fictions, 2 biographies, the texts for 4 books of photographs on Australian society, plus a travel book on Australia and a political polemic Abolish the States! His play A Return to the Brink was produced at the Malthouse for the 1999 Melbourne International Festival. He has edited/collected 6 anthologies.
His radio scripts have been broadcast by the ABC and the BBC - two 90-minute radio features were ABC Italia Prize entries. His libretto and scenario Whispers, set to music by Andrew Ford, has been performed in every Australian state capital (and recorded by Move Records). He wrote the libretto and directed the opera Dry River Run-music by Paul Dean-in 2019.
From 1967-78 he was Poetry Editor of The Australian. In 1968 he became the first writer to be awarded a resident Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University. He has been recipient of several Literature Board Fellowships and a residency at Yaddo.
He has been seven times shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, he won it for Just Relations in 1982, also for The Grisly Wife in 1994. He won the Canada-Australia Award in 1988 and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Captivity Captive in 1989. In 1970 he won third prize in the Captain Cook Bicentenary Competition for the manuscript of his novel A Place Among People. He has been twice awarded the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society, in 1992 and 2001, and three times nominated for the Booker Prize in the UK.
