Cirrus@Austlit

'Plenty of novelists begin life as poets. Few, though, have managed to maintain their status as poet–novelists quite so impressively as David Malouf. But even Malouf, in his ‘middle period’, more or less dropped poetry for his ‘big’ novels – The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993), and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) – before a late return to poetry, kicked off with Typewriter Music (2007). Perhaps appropriately, the last novel that Malouf has so far published, Ransom (2009), is based on a poem: Homer’s Iliad.'  (Introduction)