Patrick White

White was born in London to a wealthy Australian grazier family, shuttled between England and the family's New South Wales properties as a child, and returned to Australia for good only after serving in RAF intelligence during the Second World War, settling outside Sydney with his partner, the Greek immigrant Manoly Lascaris, on a smallholding they worked together for two decades.

Voss (1957), loosely based on the doomed nineteenth-century explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, follows a fanatical German expedition leader across the Australian interior toward his own destruction, rendering the outback as a landscape of near-mystical trial rather than mere setting; it established White's dense, visionary style and won him, in 1973, the only Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to an Australian.

He used the prize's platform to campaign publicly against Australian complacency, censorship, and nuclear weapons, continuing to write increasingly experimental fiction until his death in Sydney in 1990.