DAVIDD IRELAND was born in 1927 on a kitchen table in Lakemba in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer.

Ireland started out writing poetry and drama but then turned to fiction. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future.

David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagull.

David Ireland lives in New South Wales.

PETER PIERCE is adjunct professor in the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He edited The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia and The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, and is the author of Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally’s Fiction and The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. His reviews appear regularly in Australian newspapers.