#david malouf

[optikestrav]

remembering David Malouf (1934-2026)

[20th-century-personalities]

Australian Author David Malouf in 1991. The son of immigrants, he wrote narratives that blended history, memory and fiction, and explored how Australia’s founding as a penal colony reached into a more genteel present / Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

His poetic vision of Australia’s dual nature — a nation defined by its British Empire heritage, yet sheltering in an untamed outback — played out across prizewinning novels, short stories, poems and opera librettos.

[gone2soon-rip]

DAVID MALOUF (1934-Died April 22nd 2026,at 94).Australian poet,novelist and short story writer.Known for his poetry cllection,Neighbours in a Thicket,and novels such as The Great World,and Remembering Babylon.David Malouf - Wikipedia

[poem-today]

A poem by David Malouf (RIP)

At My Grandmother's

An afternoon, late summer, in a room Shuttered against the bright, envenomed leaves; An under-water world, where time, like water  Was held in the wide arms of a gilded clock, And my grandmother, turning in to the still sargasso Of memory, wound out her griefs and held A small boy prisoner to weeds and corals, While summer leaked its daylight through his head.

I feared that room, the parrot screeching soundless In its dome of glass, the faded butterflies Like jewels pinned against a sable cloak, And my grandmother winding out the skeins I held Like trickling time, between my outstretched arms;

Feared most of all the stiff, bejewelled fingers Pinned at her throat, or moving on grey wings From word to word; and feared her voice that called Down from their gilded frames the ghosts of children Who played at hoop and ball, whose spindrift faces (The drowned might wear such smiles) looked out across The wreck and debris of the years, to where A small boy sat, as they once sat, and held In the wide ache of his arms, all time, like water, And watched the old grey hands wind out his blood.

David Malouf (1934-2026)

David Malouf died April 22nd, 2026. RIP.

[dk-thrive]

dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted

What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.

– David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (Vintage, May 28, 1996) (via Alive on All Channels)

[geryone]

Ransom, David Malouf