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Profile: David Ireland

       A fascinating profile in The Australian, as Stephen Romei goes in search of David Ireland, the great unknown.
       A three-time (!) winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in the 1970s, Ireland was the kind of writer about whom, for example, Susan Lever says:
He was the sort of writer whose latest novel anyone interested in Australian literature would go out and buy, as we used to with Patrick White.
       But:
Yet that third Miles Franklin marked not only the apogee of his career but the start of a remarkable decline into near obscurity, his novels out of print, his name all but forgotten, his very existence omitted from the 1500-page Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature published to much fanfare in 2009. He is the great forgotten Australian novelist.
       With few of even Nobel-winning White's books left in print in the US such a fall into obscurity isn't entirely surprising from this vantage point, but that even in Australia he;s fallen so far is quite amazing. (Though I am familiar with the name, I've never even seen one of his books.)

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