From a Distant Shore

From a Distant Shore explores the lives and creative work of Australia's many expatriate writers living and working in Britain since the early 19th century. The book contests the notion of Australia as predominantly an 'import' culture and shows Australians exporting literary talent to Britain and further afield, from 1820 until the present. Stories of the lives and works of writers in all genres - from romance and crime to contemporary literary fiction - are interweaved in a collective biography. The book uncovers many unknown writers and document their adventures both on and off the page. It examines the expatriate lives of figures such as Pamela Travers (author of Mary Poppins), Frederic Manning, Randolph Stow, and Madeleine St. John. Additionally, it explores the work of lesser known writers, such as Jill Neville and her vibrant London literary milieu in the 1960s, Christina Stead's expatriate years, the modernist dramas of Patrick White and Barry Humphries, as well as the arguments with England expressed in the lives and work of Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, Michael Blakemore, and Geoffrey Robertson. This book is the first historically comprehensive and detailed examination of expatriate Australian writers at work in Britain. It illuminates a century and a half of intense literary activity by Australians living abroad, and it offers insight into the works of the writers and their transnational literary achievements. (Series: Australian Literary Studies) *** "In tune with our globalised world, the approach of Bennett and Pender is quite different. In place of the old polarity of cultural metropolis in England and cultural cringe at home, they are more interested in convergence, and the ways in which even the most apparently assimilated Australian writers gave a distinct inflection to British forms." - Jim Davidson, The Saturday Age, Sydney Morning Herald, March 16, 2013 *** "While attitudes to Britain and reasons for living there may have changed over the past 200 years, it has remained a drawcard for Australian writers, as Bruce Bennett nd Anne Pender demononstrate in this comprehensive study." - The Times Literary Supplement, November 1, 2013