Alex Miller (writer)

Life

Alex Miller was born in London to a Scottish father and Irish mother. After working as a farm labourer in Somerset he migrated alone to Australia at the age of 16. He worked as a ringer in Queensland and as a horse breaker in New Zealand before studying at night school to gain university entrance. Miller graduated from the University of Melbourne in English and History in 1965. In 1975 he published his first short story, 'Comrade Pawel' in Meanjin Quarterly. In 1980 he was a co-founder of the Anthill Theatre and a founding member of the Melbourne Writers' Theatre. Miller taught writing courses at Holmesglen TAFE and La Trobe University between 1986 and 1997. Miller has written full-time since 1998. In this time he has written seven of his eleven published novels and his work has received wide critical acclaim.

Alex Miller lives in country Victoria with his wife Stephanie. The Ancestor Game was re-published by Allen & Unwin in 2016 as a celebratory edition to mark 25 years since its publication and to honour the author on his 80th birthday.

Writing

Miller's first novel, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain, was published in 1988 and republished by Allen & Unwin in 2012. Major national and international recognition came with the publication of The Ancestor Game, his third novel and the winner of both the Miles Franklin Award and overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1993. Since then Miller has published on average a major novel every two years, his tenth being Autumn Laing published in 2011. The Melbourne critic Peter Craven, writing in The Australian on 14 July 2012, describes Autumn Laing as "superb" and says of it, "it is the novel that is liable to burn brightest in the whole of his oeuvre." Professor Brenda Walker suggests that 'Alex Miller may be Australia's greatest living writer'.

Robert Dixon, Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University writes that Miller's 'novels are by and large accessible to the general reading public yet manifestly of high literary seriousness - substantial, technically masterly and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight'. The Novels of Alex Miller, edited and with an introduction by Robert Dixon was published in 2012 following a two-day Symposium at the University of Sydney in 2011 as a major critical study devoted to Miller’s works. In 2014 Robert Dixon published the first sole-authored critical survey of the respected author's eleven novels. Robert Dixon's Alex Miller: the ruin of time is the first of the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series [8]

Miller's novel Autumn Laing was inspired by his lifelong interest in art and is loosely based on the relationship between Sidney Nolan and Sunday Reed.

Coal Creek, published in 2013 by Allen & Unwin and winner of the 2014 Victorian Premier's Literary Award, is Miller's most recent novel.

In 2015 Alex Miller published a collection of short stories and essays drawn from forty years of writing, The Simplest Words A Storyteller's Journey. Peter Pierce describes this collection as 'a rich, generous compilation that enticingly refracts our perceptions of one of Australia's finest novelists'.

Awards

Miller is a recipient of the Centenary Medal, and in 2008 the Manning Clark Medal for "An outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life." Miller is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Reviews

Interviews

Critical works on Alex Miller