Dal Stivens

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Dal Stivens was an Australian writer who lived from 1911 to 1997. After serving in the army during the war, from 1944 to 1949 Stivens was on the staff of the Australian Department of Information. He served in the press office at Australia House in London until 1950. He was Foundation President of the Australian Society of Authors and was a keen amateur naturalist. From 1974 he painted a substantial amount of his time.

Stivens published several collections of short stories and several novels, including The Tramp (stories, 1936), The Courtship of Uncle Henry (stories, 1946), Jimmy Brockett (aka The Entrepreneur, 1951), The Gambling Ghost (stories, 1953), Ironbark Bill (stories, 1955), The Scholarly Mouse (stories, 1957), The Wide Arch (1958), Three Persons Make A Tiger (1968), Selected Stories (1969), The Incredible Egg (Natural History, 1974), The Unicorn & Other Takes (1976), The Bushranger (1978) and The Demon Bowler & Other Cricket Tales (1979).

He won the Miles Franklin Award for best Australian novel in 1970 for Horse of Air and was winner of the Patrick White Award for 1981 for the contribution of his novels Jimmy Brockett and Horse of Air, and his short stories. He died in 1997.