John Hughes (writer)
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Dr. John Hughes is a Sydney-based Australian writer. His first book of autobiographical essays, "The Idea Of Home", published by Giramondo in 2004, was widely acclaimed and won both the NSW Premiers Literary Award for Non-Fiction (2005) and the National Biography Award (2006). The work, written over ten years, are reflections of Hughes' relationship with the Ukraine of his mother's ancestry, his idea of Europe as a young man and its clash with the reality of his experience, when offered the Shell Scholarship to Cambridge. He now teaches at Sydney Grammar School, where he is Senior Master in English and Senior Librarian.
[edit] Life
John Hughes was born in Cessnock, NSW to a father of Welsh descent, and a mother who was a second generation immigrant. Hughes' grandparents had fled Kiev during the Second World War and had walked on foot across Europe to Naples. From here, they emigrated to Australia. Much of "The Idea Of Home" is devoted the stories of this passed down through Hughes' grandfather, and their impact of a young John Hughes.
He took an undergraduate arts degree at Newcastle University, but at the end of his Honours year, was offered the Shell Scholarship to Cambridge. His preconceived notions of Europe as a place vastly more sophisticated than his provincial Cessnock prompted him to go. However, as he spent more time in England, and struggled through a PhD on Coleridge, he realised that his ideas were wrong, and that provincialism was, if not as obvious, certainly still as potent in what was considered the centre of the academic world. After this, he gave up his "life of letters", as he called it, and returned to Australia.
Back in Sydney, he unsuccessfully tried to teach at his old university, Newcastle, but his failure at Cambridge haunted him. He did, however, complete a PhD thesis at UTS, called "Memory and Forgetting". He took a position in the English Department of Sydney Grammar in 1995, under Townsend, who was soon replaced by one of Hughes' colleagues at Cambridge, Dr. John Vallance, as Headmaster.
[edit] Literature
Aside from his autobiography, Hughes has been published in HEAT Magazine, edited by Ivor Indyk, and runs Sydney Grammar's Creative Writing Group.
