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Patrick White was born in London in 1912 to wealthy Australian parents. He grew up in Sydney and on rural properties in New South Wales before being sent to school in England at age thirteen. He studied modern languages at Cambridge and later served as an RAF intelligence officer in North Africa and the Middle East during the Second World War.

After the war, White settled permanently in Australia with his partner Manoly Lascaris, living on a small farm on the outskirts of Sydney. His novels deal with spiritual searching, the Australian landscape, and the tension between visionary individuals and conventional society. The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) established his reputation, and The Eye of the Storm (1973) was published the same year he received the Nobel Prize.

White’s writing style was influenced by modernists like Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf. He split opinion among Australian critics, with some celebrating him as the country’s greatest writer and others finding his dense, poetic prose difficult. He died in Sydney in 1990. His final novel, The Hanging Garden, was published unfinished in 2012.