Patrick White
English-born Australian writer · Australia · On the map · Writers · Lived 1912 to 1990 · aged 78
The only Australian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, White wrote dense, modernist novels that savaged the country's materialist conformity - and split its critics down the middle.
Patrick White is read about 230 times a day, in 82 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 1 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
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Born in London in 1912 to wealthy Australian parents, White moved between Sydney estates and English boarding schools before reading languages at Cambridge. His first novel, Happy Valley, won the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal in 1939. During World War II he served as an RAF intelligence officer in Alexandria, where he met Manoly Lascaris in 1941 - the man he later called "the central mandala in my life's hitherto messy design." The pair returned to Australia in 1948 and bought a farm outside Sydney, where White wrote The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957), the novels that made his name in America and Britain. Through the 1960s he turned out major works - Riders in the Chariot, The Solid Mandala - and plays that reshaped Australian theatre. He spent his later decades in Centennial Park, writing, protesting the Vietnam War, championing Aboriginal rights and nuclear disarmament, and producing novels like The Eye of the Storm and the memoir Flaws in the Glass before his death in 1990.
