The Girl Green As Elderflower

As eccentric as it is magnificently achieved.’ * Geordie Williamson *<br />His novels and poetry embody a uniquely rich and strange account of the land and people of Australia that we can ill afford to lose.’ * Australian Book Review *
It is a rare pleasure for those of us who are already fans to have these works at our disposal…[Stow was] the most talented and celebrated Australian author of the post-White generation.’ * Monthly *<br />It should be taken as no commentary on contemporary Oz Lit that I choose Text’s fistful of Randolph Stow reissues for my local favourite(s) during 2015. Their appearance reminds us that a gentle, wise, wounded, and immensely talented poet in prose once lived among us.’ * Geordie Williamson, Australian Book Review, Books of the Year 2015 *

Randolph Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth.

While at university, he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957. The following year, his third novel, To the Islands, won the same award, as well as the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow later reworked the novel for a second edition, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished.

He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea, an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels. He then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s, he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. During this period, he published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite.

For years afterward, Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti, and reviews. In 1969, he settled permanently in England, first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the Patrick White Award in 1979.

Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’.

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