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Image by permission of the National Library of Australia: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-136222240/view
Nicholas Jose Nicholas Jose i(A29898 works by) (a.k.a. Robert Nicholas Jose)
Born: Established: 1952 London,
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England,
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United Kingdom (UK),
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Western Europe, Europe,
;
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

Nicholas Jose was born in London, and grew up in Australia. He was educated at St Peter's College, Adelaide, and the Australian National University. Winning a Rhodes Scholarship in 1974, he completed a PhD on seventeenth century English literature at Oxford University. He taught for several years at the Australian National University before spending eighteen months teaching and writing in China. In 1987 he was appointed Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing, an appointment he held until 1990.

Jose's first book of fiction is the short story collection The Possession of Amber (1980). During the 1980s he published another collection and several novels, including the widely-admired Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989), the first of Jose's novels to exhibit his interest in Chinese language and culture. Since 1990, Jose has written more novels based on his experience and knowledge of China, and a novel, The Custodians (1996), that explores the concept of custodianship in Australia. He has also written reviews, short stories, essays, poetry and travel articles, many of which deal with aspects of Chinese art and culture. His novel The Red Thread (2000) interweaves his translation of the Chinese story Six Chapters of a Floating Life with a contemporary narrative by using a red ink for the former story. Jose's writing has been supported by fellowships from the Australia-China Council, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Australia Council.

Since 2005 he has been Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and then Chair of Writing at the University of Western Sydney. Jose has been appointed to the Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2009.

Exhibitions

17457043
17022329

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon The Idealist Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26363856 2023 single work novel 'Set in Australia, East Timor and Washington in the lead up to the independence referendum in East Timor in 1999, The Idealist is a novel which explores the entanglement of private and public life. It is a political mystery, the portrait of a marriage, a reflection on friendship, and a study of a personality as it breaks down under pressure. Jake, an Australian defence analyst, is torn between his support for the people of East Timor, whose commitment to independence in the face of mounting violence, he has experienced personally, and his sense of responsibility for, and complicity in, the actions of his government. When he is found dead in the garage of his Washington home, after passing secret intelligence to his American counterpart, his wife Anne wants justice. The narrative is told from changing perspectives, moving through time and memory, in search of what really happened. It is a story, above all, about the formation, necessity and human cost of idealism.' 

(Publication summary)

2024 shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award Book of the Year
y separately published work icon Bapo Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2014 8009903 2014 selected work short story

'The title of Nicholas Jose’s new collection of stories refers to a form of Chinese painting that tricks the eye into thinking what it sees is a collage of fragments. Bapo literally means ‘eight broken’, where eight is a Chinese lucky number and ‘broken’ implies that luck has run out – though the term also suggests that there’s another kind of luck, in simply surviving, and being able to hold the pieces of one’s life together in some sort of order.

'Jose’s stories feature a cast of characters affected by time or chance in different ways, artists, diplomats, entrepreneurs, immigrants, families at the crossroads. Many explore Australia’s relationship to China or have echoes of China in them; others dwell on the qualities of memory, resilience, play and adventure – qualities which are implicit in the form of bapo, and characteristic of Jose’s writing as a whole. (Publication summary)

2015 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards University of Southern Queensland Australian Short Story Collection – Steele Rudd Award
y separately published work icon Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2009 Z1590615 2009 anthology correspondence diary drama essay extract poetry prose short story (taught in 23 units)

'Some of the best, most significant writing produced in Australia over more than two centuries is gathered in this landmark anthology. Covering all genres - from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches - the anthology maps the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety.

'The writing reflects the diverse experiences of Australians in their encounter with their extraordinary environment and with themselves. This is literature of struggle, conflict and creative survival. It is literature of lives lived at the extremes, of frontiers between cultures, of new dimensions of experience, where imagination expands.

'This rich, informative and entertaining collection charts the formation of an Australian voice that draws inventively on Indigenous words, migrant speech and slang, with a cheeky, subversive humour always to the fore. For the first time, Aboriginal writings are interleaved with other English-language writings throughout - from Bennelong's 1796 letter to the contemporary flowering of Indigenous fiction and poetry - setting up an exchange that reveals Australian history in stark new ways.

'From vivid settler accounts to haunting gothic tales, from raw protest to feisty urban satire and playful literary experiment, from passionate love poetry to moving memoir, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature reflects the creative eloquence of a society.

'Chosen by a team of expert editors, who have provided illuminating essays about their selections, and with more than 500 works from over 300 authors, it is an authoritative survey and a rich world of reading to be enjoyed.' (Publisher's blurb)

Allen and Unwin have a YouTube channel with a number of useful videos on the Anthology.

2010 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
2010 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Special Award

Known archival holdings

National Library of Australia (ACT)
Last amended 27 Aug 2019 12:28:08
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