Literature champion to deliver lecture
First published 26 July, 2012
Frank Moorhouse, one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed writers, will deliver the 2012 Colin Roderick Lecture at the Perc Tucker Gallery next Tuesday (July 31).
The lecture is sponsored by James Cook University’s Foundation for Australian Literary Studies (FALS).
Mr Moorhouse, AM, is an Australian writer best known for his short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and film scripts. The fiction ranges from comic satire to novels dealing with personal lives in international political settings. It combines humour and intellectual insight.
The Colin Roderick Lecture will focus on Mr Moorhouse’s ‘Edith trilogy’, which traces the life of a young woman who enters the world of diplomacy in the 1920s through to her involvement in the newly formed International Atomic Energy Agency after World War II. The trilogy combines fiction with history in a unique way.
Frank Moorhouse has received most of the awards open to Australian writers, from the Miles Franklin Award, the Adelaide Festival National Prize for Fiction, The Age Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal for Australian Fiction to the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate.
His work has been published in the UK and the USA and has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian and Swedish.
Founded in 1966, the annual Colin Roderick Lecture honours the work of the late Professor Colin Roderick, an enthusiastic champion of Australian literature who became JCU’s Professor of English Literature in 1965.
He created FALS to foster the study of Australian literature. He himself published widely on Australian writers, edited Henry Lawson’s verse, fiction and letters and wrote biographies of Rosa Praed, Lawson, Leichardt and Miles Franklin.
Date: Tuesday 31 July, 2012
Time: 6.00pm – 7.30pm
Location: Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Flinders Mall, Townsville
Admission by gold coin.
For more information, contact FALS on (07) 4781 5097
For interviews, contact Associate Professor Don Gallagher on 4779 9074 or Associate Professor Stephen Torre on (07) 4042 1052
JCU Media contact: Caroline Kaurila (07) 4781 4586 or 0437 028 175
JCU Media contact: Caroline Kaurila (07) 4781 4586 or 0437 028 175.