Randolph Stow

Julian Randolph Stow (28 November 1935 – 29 May 2010) was an award winning Australian-born writer, novelist and poet.

Early life
Born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Randolph Stow attended Geraldton Primary and High schools, Guildford Grammar School, the University of Western Australia, and the University of Sydney. During his undergraduate years in Western Australia he wrote two novels and a collection of poetry, which were published in London by Macdonald & Co. He taught English Literature at the University of Adelaide, the University of Western Australia and the University of Leeds.

Career
He also worked on an Aboriginal mission in the Kimberley, which he used as background for his third novel To the Islands. Stow further worked as an assistant to an anthropologist, Charles Julius, and cadet patrol officer in the Trobriand Islands. In the Trobriands he suffered a mental and physical breakdown that led to his repatriation to Australia. Twenty years later, he used these last experiences in his novel Visitants.

England and America
Stow's first visit to England took place in 1960, after which he returned several times to Australia. Tourmaline, his fourth novel, was completed in Leeds in 1962. In 1964 and 1965 he travelled in North America on a Harkness Fellowship, including a sojourn in Aztec, New Mexico, during which he wrote one of his best known novels, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea. While living in Perth (WA) in 1966 he wrote his popular children's book Midnite.

From 1969 to 1981 he lived at East Bergholt in Suffolk in England, his ancestral county, and he used traditional tales from that area to inform his novel The Girl Green as Elderflower. The last decades of his life he spent in nearby Harwich, the setting for his final novel The Suburbs of Hell. He last visited Australia in 1974.

Awards and legacy
His novel To the Islands won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. He was awarded the Patrick White Award in 1979. As well as producing fiction, poetry, and numerous book reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, he also wrote libretti for musical theatre works by Peter Maxwell Davies.

A considerable number of Randolph Stow's poems are listed in the State Library of Western Australia online catalogue with indications where they have been anthologised.

Personal life
A deeply private person, Stow's life was dogged at times by loneliness and depression (including two suicide attempts), probable alcoholism, an addiction to prescription drugs, and a struggle to come to come to terms with his homosexuality in a time when it was oppressed.

Death
He died in England of a pulmonary embolism after being diagnosed with liver cancer at the age of 74.

Awards list

 * Australian Literature Society gold medal, 1957, 1958
 * 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award
 * Britannica—Australia award, 1966
 * Grace Leven Prize, 1969
 * 1979 Patrick White Award
 * 1989 The Randolph Stow Young Writers Award was established in his honour to encourage school students in the Geraldton region of Western Australia to write.

Novels

 * A Haunted Land (1956)
 * The Bystander (1957)
 * To the Islands (1958) (revised in 1982)
 * Tourmaline (1963)
 * The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965)
 * Visitants (1979)
 * The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980)
 * The Suburbs of Hell (1984)

Poetry

 * Act One (1957)
 * Outrider: Poems 1956–1962 (1962)
 * A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems (1969)
 * The Land's Meaning: New Selected Poems ed. John Kinsella. Fremantle Press (2012)

Children's

 * Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy 1967

Musical Theatre

 * Eight Songs for a Mad King 1969, libretto
 * Miss Donnithorne's Maggot 1974, libretto