AustLit

'Kate Leah Rendell has capitalised on the revitalised enthusiasm for Randolph Stow with Randolph Stow: Critical Essays, an edited collection of thirteen pieces exploring the writer of fiction and the man. It was Suzanne Falkiner’s hefty tome, Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow (2015), that sparked renewed interest in a once-major writer who had descended into oblivion by the time of his death in 2010. Stow had ranked among Australia’s major writers for most of the late twentieth century. At age 22, he won the Miles Franklin Prize for his third novel, To the Islands (1958). His subsequent novels, Tourmaline (1962) and The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965) achieved classic status almost immediately. Stow’s history followed a pattern common enough among creative Australians in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He left the country in his twenties, in the early 1960s, leading a life as wanderer and then as a permanent exile. After an extended visit to Australia in 1974, Stow left for England—Suffolk—never to return. His writing silences moved from prolonged to permanent; after the 1984 publication of The Suburbs of Hell, Stow did not publish another work.' (Introduction)