In October 1973, Australian novelist Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This week’s reading trail heads back to 1957, when White published an extract from Voss, his fifth novel, in Meanjin, volume 16, no. 3. This book, a fictionalised telling of the story of Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, follows the expeditions of White’s explorer – Johan Ulrich Voss – into and across the Australian continent after his meeting in Sydney with a young woman, Laura Trevelyan.
A bestseller, Voss is described as White’s breakthrough book. It was awarded the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award for a novel ‘of the highest literary merit [that] presents Australian life in any of its phases’ in 1957, and the UK’s WH Smith Literary Award in 1959.
Follow “The Death of Palfreyman” with Meanjin’s 2018 retrospective of writing by and about Patrick White, curated in celebration of the 45th anniversary of the Nobel Prize.
For Meanjin’s next reading trail in support of the ABC’s hunt for the Top 100 Australian books, we hope you’ll enjoy meeting or re-meeting Patrick White.
The Death of Palfreyman – an extract from Voss by Patrick White, published in Meanjin, Spring 1957.
Patrick White – a retrospective – this collection, from 2018, includes White’s fiction as well as essays by Neil Armfield, Marjorie Barnard, Sue Rabbitt Roff, and a poem by Marcelle Freiman.
…