On David Malouf

‘[on reading Malouf for the first time] Here was a very-much-alive half-Lebanese (from provincial Brisbane, no less) producing English-language writing of the first order. And that in prose, not poetry. The poetry was in the prose; it stayed and sprung its rhythms, chorded its ideas, concentrated its images. Every other novel claims to be written in “poetic prose”; the real thing, when you come ac...