‘Reading biographies to overcome loneliness’: Reflections of an accidental biographer

Frank Moorhouse (1938–2022) is best known as a writer of literary fiction. All of his fiction is connected, with his many books sharing characters and experiences, including across generations, and covering much of the 20th century: one of the most sustained feats of the imagination in Australia’s literary history. This alone would warrant a closer look at Moorhouse, but at the same time, he was part of a generation that overturned federal censorship, and through a series of landmark legal cases – most notably the copyright case of the early 1970s – he contributed toward establishing much of the literary infrastructure that we take for granted today – and which we are currently at risk of losing. Moorhouse also had a colourful and complicated personal life, the full extent of which – together with his writing and intellectual life, his political and literary advocacy – could only be justly addressed in a biographical narrative form. In this Biography Workshop Matthew Lamb will reflect on the challenges faced and the choices made trying to contain these multitudes in such a narrative form, and the lessons learned about the nature of literary biography.

Matthew Lamb is the author of Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths (Knopf, 2023), the first in a projected two volume cultural biography of Frank Moorhouse. He is a former editor of Review of Australian Fiction and Island magazines and has two PhDs, in literature and philosophy. He currently writes the Public Things Newsletter on the relationship between literary culture and democracy.