Patrick White

Patrick White was an Australian novelist and playwright whose books, including The Tree of Man, Voss and Riders in the Chariot, probe religious experience, personal identity and the clash between visionary individuals and a conformist society. His novels, shaped by modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, pushed against the realist prose of his home country. He also wrote plays such as The Season at Sarsaparilla. White won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, the only Australian to receive it, and died in 1990.