A busy day for Australian authors' birthdays today, 5th May, with T.A.G. Hungerford, Elliot Perlman, and Kit Denton all saluting the candles. T.A.G. Hungerford turns 90 today. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1988 for services to literature. and was the winner of the Patrick White Award in 1992. He has published 10 novels, including The Ridge and the River, Sowers of the Wind, and Swagbelly Birdsnatcher and the Prince of Siam. "The Weekend Australian" recently carried a major profile of the man.
Eliott Perlman was born in 1964 and has been featured quite a bit on this site over the past few months. The film adaptation of his first novel, Three Dollars, was recently released, and his latest work, Seven Types of Ambiguity, is getting mixed reviews around the world.
Kit Denton, father of ABC television interviewer Andrew Denton, was born in 1928, and is best known for his work The Breaker. This novel told the story of Breaker Morant, an English-born Australian poet who fought in the Boer War in South Africa, and who was court-martialled and shot for executing Boer prisoners in 1902. Kit Denton died in 1997.
