The Cockatoos

‘The Cockatoos…is superb. It is a slow, beautiful dance of love and death.’ * Chicago Tribune Book World *‘[White’s] style in this collection of stories is taut and his language knowing, almost savage, in its ironies. Never does he swerve from a tone of complete authority, nor are his portrayals of human frailty ever less than bitingly perceptive.’ * Baltimore Sun *‘To read Patrick White…is to touch a source of power, to move through areas made new and fresh, to see men and women with a sharpened gaze.’ * Daily Telegraph (London) *‘White is a shifty, complex artist with the ability to hit and run at any point in his narrative – maintaining a distance from emotional involvement while inexorably tightening those screws.’ * Kirkus Reviews *‘White’s work is a towering achievement’ * Courier-Mail *

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England and served in the RAF, before returning to Australia after World War II.

Happy Valley, White’s first novel, is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains and is based on his experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro.

White went on to publish twelve further novels (one posthumously), three short-story collections and eight plays. His novels include The Aunt’s Story and Voss, which won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Eye of the Storm and The Twyborn Affair.

He was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1973, and is considered one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century.

White died in 1990, aged seventy-eight.