Alex Miller

Alex Miller is the author of an astounding ten novels – and the owner of a swag of literary awards, including two Miles Franklins (for Journey to the Stone Country and The Ancestor Game). His beautifully wrought, intricately thoughtful, novels excavate the heart of the Australian psyche, including the complex relationship between indigenous and settler Australia.

Miller’s work is often informed by his early experience working and travelling in outback Australia, as a stockman and various other jobs, after emigrating from England at the age of 16.

Coal Creek, his much-praised latest novel, sprang directly from that time. Miller inhabits the inarticulate character of Bobby Blue, a stockman’s son who becomes deputy to the local constable – an outsider with cosmopolitan views that don’t fit with the land he has arrived in. It’s a novel of love, betrayal, and what happens when cultures clash and lines are crossed.