Andrew McGahan was the ninth of ten children who grew up on a wheat farm in Dalby, Queensland. He attended St Columba’s and St Mary’s College in Dalby, and then Marist College, Ashgrove in Brisbane. He began an Arts degree at the University of Queensland but left it unfinished to return to the family farm and start his first novel. He completed the novel but it remained unpublished. He then spent the next few years working in a variety of jobs until 1991 when he wrote his first published novel, Praise.

Praise became an Australian bestseller, and is often credited with launching the short-lived ‘Grunge Lit’ movement. This terminology did not fit well with McGahan and several other of the writers to whom it was applied. McGahan later wrote the screenplay version of Praise, and the feature film featuring Sacha Horler and Peter Fenton, directed by John Curran, was released in 1999. The film won multiple awards, including an AFI Award to McGahan for the screenwriting.

In 1995 McGahan followed up with the prequel to Praise, 1988, partially based on time he spent as a lighthouse worker in the Northern Territory during Australia’s bicentennial year. McGahan then went on to pen The White Earth, an epic and gothic tale. The text won a raft of literary awards, most notably the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 he wrote Underground, an absurdist satire attacking the more extreme manifestations of the War on Terror in Australia. It received mixed reviews and caused conservative commentator Andrew Bolt to declare McGahan an ‘unhinged propagandist’.

Andrew successfully turned his talent to both stage and screen, winning a Matilda Award and an AFI Award, and in 2009 was shortlisted for the Manning Clark House National Cultural Awards for his contribution to Australian literature. Famously reluctant to do publicity or make appearances, McGahan was an author who wanted his writing to speak for itself. He was a novelist who, rather than merely pushing the boundaries, recognised no boundaries to imagination; any subject, any genre, any way of telling his stories was fair game. McGahan lived in Melbourne, with his partner of many years, Liesje. He died of pancreatic cancer at age 52 in 2019.