To the Islands

<i>To the Islands</i> is a deeply moving and compassionate novel whose message and wisdom is still important today, which is why it deserves to be recognised as an important work of Australian literature.’ * theconversation.com *<br />To the Islands is a masterpiece.’ * ANZ LitLovers *
Powerful and convincing...An Australian classic.’ -- Anthony J. Hassall
<br />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 *
`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 *

Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ 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. His third novel, To the Islands, won the same award the following year, as well as the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, 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—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. 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 afterwards, 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 1979 Patrick White Award.

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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