Cirrus@Austlit

As a child Alexander McPhee Miller lived in south London, the son of an Irish mother and a Scottish father, whose background he has described as 'culturally rich'. Before migrating alone to Australia when he was seventeen years old he worked on a farm in the west of England. Then, after working as itinerant stockman on cattle stations in Central Queensland and the Gulf Country and travelling around Australia, he studied History and English at the University of Melbourne, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1965. Miller completed a Diploma of Education at the Melbourne State College in 1975, and he began teaching a writing course at Brunswick Technical School the following year. He had started writing poetry when he was twenty-two. He has also worked as an art dealer, farmer and public servant.

Miller was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Australian Nouveau Theatre, 1981, co-founder of the Anthill Theatre and a founding member of the Melbourne Writers' Theatre, 1982. He has taught the prose writing course at Holmesglen College of TAFE, Victoria, since 1986, and was Visiting Fellow at La Trobe University 1994 -1995. Miller writes full-time and lives in the Victorian country town of Castlemaine.

When asked to name influential writers on his own work, Miller replied: 'Wilde, Tournier, White. George Eliot and Proust. These are all on my shelves, along with Duras and Beckett and Artaud and Celine and so on and on. And that astonishing biography, A Life, by David Marr. All books that are better at second reading. And not all books are... But where's the influence?... I could say more confidently who hasn't influenced me than who has. Joyce and the great American writers of the twentieth century. But then I like the intimate, the lyrical, the detailed, the confiding moment; the hard-won simplicities of a modest prose, deceptive and clear and smooth, rather than the fireworks displays, the crackling blaze of glory where nothing is what it is but is forever akin to something else.'

Source of quotation: http://www.allenandunwin.com
Sighted: 06/02/2007