Frank Moorhouse

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Frank Moorhouse (born 21 December 1938 in Nowra, NSW) is an Australian writer of short stories, screenplays and novels. He won the 2001 Miles Franklin Award for Dark Palace, the second in his series of novels about the League of Nations.

His first short story was published in Southerly in 1957. During the 1960s, Moorhouse was associated with the Sydney Push — a progressive group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. He was also a member of the WEA Film Study Group with such notable people as John Flaus, Michael Thornhill and Ken Quinnell. After some time working for rural NSW newspapers, Moorhouse moved to the bohemian inner-Sydney suburb of Balmain, which was to become a central setting of much of his work. His first interwoven short story collection (called by him 'a discontinuous narrative') was Futility and Other Animals (1969), followed by The Americans, Baby (1972) which explored the Americanization of Australian culture. Further books included The Electrical Experience (1974), the novella Conference-Ville (1976), Tales of Mystery and Romance (1977), and The Everlasting Secret Family (1980). His very funny travel pieces/essays/fictions are collected in Room Service (1985), Late Shows (1990) Loose Living (1995) and Inspector-General of Misconception: Despatches from the Office (2002).

He did not write a full-length novel until Forty-Seventeen (1988) which won The Age Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal. His long and ambitious novel of the League of Nations, Grand Days (1993), was a critical success but missed out on the Miles Franklin Award for not containing sufficient Australian content. The second League of Nations novel, Dark Palace (2000), won the award.

He has edited several anthologies, including Days of Wine and Rage (1980), The State of the Art, Fictions 88 and the 2004 and 2005 Best Australian Stories.

His work as a scriptwriter for film and television began with short films, The American Poet's Visit (1969), The Girl from the Family of Man (1970) and The Machine Gun (1971). His first screenplay for a feature film was Between Wars (1974). This film was directed by Michael Thornhill, who has also directed many of Moorhouse's screenplays including The American Poet's Visit (1969), The Girl from the Family of Man (1970) and The Machine Gun (1971), Between Wars (1974), The Ever-Lasting Secret Family (1988) and Who Killed Baby Azaria? Many of Frank Moorhouse's screenplays have their origins in his literary work. He adapted his book, The Ever-Lasting Secret Family into a film, released in 1988; while The American Poet's Visit (1969), The Girl from the Family of Man (1970) and The Machine Gun (1971), The Girl Who Met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris (1980) and The Coca-Cola Kid (1985) were based on his short stories. The exception to this is his screenplay for television of the docudrama Who Killed Baby Azaria? (1983) aka The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, about the Azaria Chamberlain disappearance.

In 2005 he published Martini: A Memoir (Knopf). He announced in late 2006 that he is working on the third volume of his League of Nations series.

[edit] Reference

Brian McFarlane, Geoff Mayer, Ina Bertrand (Ed.) (1999). The Oxford companion to Australian film. Melbourne, Australia ; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-553797-1.