Patrick White

Patrick Victor Martindale White (1912 — 1990) was an Australian writer and is regarded as a major English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays.

As a youth White moved between Australia and England, where he attended Cambridge University. His youth is full of the misery of boarding schools and loneliness (partly due to his homosexuality); White described his time at Cheltenham College as a four-year-prison-sentence.
After serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, he returned to Australia, which he saw as a country in a volatile process of growth and self-definition. His somewhat misanthropic novels often explore the possibilities of savagery in that context; they include The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), and The Twyborn Affair (1979). His other works include plays and short stories, the latter collected in The Burnt Ones (1964) and The Cockatoos (1974). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.