Australian writer Patrick White was BOTD in 1912. Born in London, England, to an affluent Australian family, he spent his childhood in Sydney, and was sent to school in England. His parents, concerned that their delicate son wanted to pursue an artistic career, sent him back to Australia to work on a farm. He returned to England to study at Cambridge University, where he had his first sexual experience with a trainee priest. He published his first novel, Happy Valley, in 1939, showing the influence of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. During World War Two, he served in the Royal Air Force, where he met Manoly Lascaris, a Greek army officer who became his life partner. After the war, he and Lascaris returned to Australia, buying a small farm at Castle Hill outside Sydney. He rose to international fame with his 1955 novel The Tree of Man, a multi-generational epic of a rural Australian family. Largely rejecting the realist prose style of his contemporaries, he adopted a dense, elliptical prose, steeped in references to Biblical imagery and indigenous Australian and Western mythology. His 1957 novel Voss, a fictionalised account of a 19th century explorer who went missing in the Australian bush, won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. His 1961 novel Riders in the Chariot finally endeared him to Australian literary critics, winning him his third Miles Franklin Award. His play cycle The Season at Sarsaparilla and A Cheery Soul, set in a fictional Sydney suburb, were staged to great success throughout the 1960s. In 1973, he became the first Australian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Reclusive, taciturn and uncomfortable with the demands of literary celebrity, he was a highly visible and articulate opponent of the Vietnam War, military conscription and nuclear warfare, a champion of free speech and a vocal supporter of Australia’s republican movement. His 1981 memoir Flaws in the Grass excised all references to his homosexuality and relationship with Lascaris, but attracted controversy for his unflattering portraits of politician Sir John Kerr, the opera singer Joan Sutherland and the artist Sidney Nolan. He died in 1990 aged 78. David Marr’s biography, written with White’s consent and published after his death, confirmed White’s homosexuality.