Cirrus@Austlit

Robert Dessaix was born in Sydney and adopted at an early age. He was educated at North Sydney Boys High School and the Australian National University. His interest in Russian literature led him to study in Moscow during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Upon gaining his PhD, Dessaix changed his surname from 'Jones' (the name of his adoptive parents) to 'Dessaix' (the name of his biological parents). After teaching Russian language and literature at the University of New South Wales and the Australian National University for almost twenty years (including translating works from Russian to English in collaboration with Michael Ullman), Dessaix began a career as a writer, reviewer and broadcaster.

Beginning in 1985, Dessaix produced and presented the ABC Radio program Books and Writing for ten years. Since the early 1980s, his reviews and short stories have appeared in a variety of journals and newspapers and he has edited several anthologies, including Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing (1993). He has published translations, collections of prose, and novels, winning several awards in the late 1990s. Dessaix's widely admired autobiography, A Mother's Disgrace (1994), recounts the search for his birth mother and the discovery of his sexuality, explaining the development of his personal philosophy.

Robert Dessaix lives in Tasmania. He is a regular speaker at writers' festivals, but regards himself as a dilletante rather than a public intellectual. In 2002, he was awarded the Chevalier dans l'Ordre de Arts des Lettres for services to French culture. His works have won and been shortlisted for a range of prestigious Australian prizes, including the Colin Roderick Award, the Margaret Scott Prize, and the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. In 2019, his non-fiction work The Pleasure of Leisure was longlisted for the Margaret Scott Prize.