Roger McDonald
AUTHOR

Roger McDonald

Travel & Tourism | Literature & Fiction
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The Australian writer Roger McDonald was born at Young, NSW, in 1941, and educated at country schools and in Sydney. When he started writing fiction, in his 30s, he said that "nothing else seemed able to express a full range of characters and moods, the panorama of Australian life that I felt was there to portray". His first novel was "1915", a novel of Gallipoli, winner of the Age Book of the Year, and made into a highly successful eight-part ABC-TV mini-series (now on DVD). Since 1980 McDonald has published nine novels and two works of non-fiction, all dealing with aspects of the Australian experience in vivid prose and with intense characterisation. Seven of his books are available from Random House, Australia. He has lived on farms (no farm animals except poultry and a corrugated iron sheep) outside Braidwood, near Canberra, with intervals spent in Sydney and New Zealand. His account of travelling the outback with a team of New Zealand shearers, "Shearers' Motel", won the National Book Council Banjo Award for non-fiction. His bestselling novel "Mr Darwin's Shooter", was awarded the New South Wales, Victorian, and South Australian Premiers' Literary Awards. "The Ballad of Desmond Kale" won Australia's premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award in 2006, as well as the South Australian Festival Prize for Fiction and the Victorian Vance Palmer Prize. A long story that eventually became part of "When Colts Ran" in 2010 was awarded the O. Henry Prize (USA) in 2008. McDonald says that he writes out of the harsh beauty of the Australian landscape and the way it shapes character. His ninth novel, "The Following" was published in September 2013. It traces a story of political attachment over two generations.
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