Profile of Frank Moorhouse on Famous Like Me

Frank Moorhouse (b. 1938 in Nowra, NSW) is an Australian writer of short stories and novels. He won the 2001 Miles Franklin Award for Dark Palace, the second in his series of novels about the League of Nations.

After some time working for rural NSW newspapers, Moorhouse moved to the bohemian inner-Sydney suburb of Balmain, which was to become a central setting of much of his work. His first interwoven short story collection (called by him 'a discontinuous narrative') was Futility and Other Animals (1969), followed by The Americans, Baby (1972) which explored the Americanization of Australian culture. Further books included The Electrical Experience (1974), the novella Conference-Ville (1976), Tales of Mystery and Romance (1977), and The Ever-Lasting Secret Family (1980). His very funny travel pieces/fictions are collected in Room Service (1985), Late Shows (1990) Loose Living (1995) and Inspector-General of Misconception: Despatches from the Office (2002).

He did not write a full-length novel until Forty-Seventeen (1988) which won The Age Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal. His long and ambitious novel of the League of Nations, Grand Days (1993), was a critical success but missed out on the Miles Franklin Award for not containing sufficient Australian content. The second League of Nations novel, Dark Palace (2000), won the award.

He has edited several anthologies, including Days of Wine and Rage (1980), The State of the Art, Fictions 88 and Best Australian Stories 2004.

He is currently (2005) writing a 'Martini Memoir', which has been excerpted in the Sydney Morning Herald's magazine supplement The Good Weekend.

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