Ransom

Author: David Malouf

Arguably, one of Australia’s greatest writers of all time, David Malouf’s ten year hiatus from writing sees Ransom, an epic tale of sanctity and sacrifice, told against the back group of the Trojan War, emerges in a thought-provoking, intensely evocative novel spanning five parts. Malouf’s fable, at times parabolic, engraves the epic themes of the Trojan conflict between the majestic city of Troy and the super-power of Greece into a perfect ‘miniature’.

Born in Australian in 1934, Malouf matriculated with Honours from the University of Queensland and had always held an interest in writing. No stranger to cultural diversity, Malouf is the son of a Lebanese-Christian father and an English-Jewish mother.

He didn’t begin seriously writing until the late 1970’s, when he resigned from his teaching position at the University of Sydney and released two books of poetry within five years of one another. His first novel Johnno (1975), a semi-biographical account, tells of a young man on the cusp of adulthood living in the outskirts of Brisbane during the Second World War.

In was only when he began venturing into the retellings of ancient legends that Malouf’s lyrical incline blossomed; An Imaginary Life (1978) is a story about the fictional life of the poem Ovid, banished from Rome by the Emperor Augustus in 8 A.D and sent to live in exile among the Scythians on the coast of the Black Sea. Whatever his content, the works in his later life always consisted of conflict of some sort and this notion is repeated again in his Child’s Play with Eustace and the Prowler (1982) which handles terrorism in short narrative, and his popular Fly Away Peter (1982) which contrasts the idyllic setting of a bird sanctuary on the coast of Northern Australia with the horrors of The Great War. Ransom, written in 2009, is at the forefront of his repertoire and was shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, receiving positive reviews from a myriad of publications including The New Yorker and the Washington Post.

In addition, the Herald Sun released an article in 2014, praising the sophistication of Malouf’s Ransom and celebrating its place on the current Victorian Curriculum booklist. Calling it a reverential footnote to the Homer’s Iliad, an epic poem written in the 8th century BC, they acclaim Malouf’s injection of emotion and human pathos into an otherwise ancient recount.

As well as writing poetry, short stories and novels, Malouf wrote the dialogue for a series of modern day adaptation operas including Baa Black Sheep (1986) and a later collaboration on Jane Eyre: An Opera. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011. Well into his ninth decade, he now spends his time between his home in Brisbane and Tuscany, where he says he enjoys the solitude.

The Queen

Director: Stephen Frears

Born in England in 1941, Stephen Frears is a film and television director known for movies that use true events to inform his audience’s understanding of social class.

Originally, he began as an assistant director in theatre and film before he gained acclaim for the film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), a film that explored homosexuality. Receiving Academy Award nominations for his American films Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and The Grifters (1990), Frears focused on remaking stories by either adapting them from novels or reimaging them from earlier film. His 1996 version of the story of the Hyde/Jekyll tale called Mary Reilly allowed a female protagonist to narrate, in the form of a meek housemaid (played by Julia Roberts), for the first time in the numerous retellings of this story.

For his 2006 film The Queen, which examines the British royal family’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana, Frears was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.

His latest films include The Program (2015), about a journalist attempting to expose the truth about competitive cyclist Lance Armstrong and his doping scandal, Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) which featured Meryl Streep as a delusional socialite who pursues an opera career despite her lack of vocal talent, and many more films that are drawn from real life people and events.