Alex Miller (b. 1936), one of Australia’s most decorated and popular authors, migrated from England to Australia on his own as a sixteen-year-old. He completed his education at night school, and then studied English and History at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1965. His first novel, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain, was published in 1988, by which time he was teaching creative writing in Melbourne. The Ancestor Game (1992), Miller’s third novel, won the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for 1993. He was able to give up teaching and write full-time in 1998 and he has since published another ten novels, among them Conditions of Faith (2000), which was awarded the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction; Journey to the Stone Country (2002), for which Miller won the Miles Franklin for a second time; and Lovesong (2009), which won the Christina Stead Prize and the Age Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and the Prime Minister's Prize for Fiction. Autumn Laing (2011), based loosely on the relationship between Sid Nolan and Sunday Reed, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Prize for Fiction in 2012. That year, Miller was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature in acknowledgment of his outstanding contribution to Australian letters. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a recipient of the Centenary Medal, Miller has also published a collection of short stories; a biography about his friend Max Blatt (Max, 2021, which was shortlisted for the National Biography Award); two plays; many essays; and the autobiographical novel The Passage of Love 2017). His thirteenth novel, A Brief Affair, was released in 2022.
