Australian Literature

Australian literature in English began soon after the settlement of the country by Europeans. Common themes include indigenous and settler identity, alienation, exile and relationship to place - but it is a varied and contested area.

Australia ’s first novel, Quintus Servinton: A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence was written and published in Tasmania in 1831. It was written by the convicted English forger Henry Savery and published anonymously though the authorship became a public secret

Poetry played an important part in the founding of Australian literature. Two poets who are amongst the great Australian poets are Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsa Gordon; Gordon was once referred to as the "national poet of Australia" and is the only Australian with a monument in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in England.

Prominent Australian poets of the twentieth century include A. D. Hope, Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray and more recently John Forbes and John Tranter. More recent and emerging Australian poets include Kylie Rose, Judith Beveridge and Andrew Slattery

Australian literature can be thought of as coming of age in 1973 when Patrick White became the first (and so far only) Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (2003 laureate John M. Coetzee lives in Adelaide, South Australia, but was born in South Africa and is not widely regarded as Australian.)

Source: http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/lit.html