Andrew McGahan


Andrew McGahan was an Australian novelist, best known for his first novel Praise, and for his Miles Franklin Award-winning novel The White Earth. His novel Praise is considered to be part of the Australian literary genre of grunge lit.

Early life and education

Born in Dalby, Queensland, McGahan was the ninth of ten children and grew up on a wheat farm. His schooling was at St Columba's and St Mary's colleges in Dalby, and then Marist College Ashgrove in Brisbane. He commenced an Arts degree at the University of Queensland, but dropped out halfway through, in 1985, to return to the family farm, and to commence his first novel – which was never published. He then spent the next few years working in a variety of jobs, until 1991, when he wrote his first published novel, Praise.

Literary career

Novels

In 1991 McGahan won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished novels with Praise – a semi-autobiographical account of a doomed, drug and alcohol-fuelled relationship. It became an Australian bestseller, and is often credited with launching the short-lived Grunge Lit or Dirty realism movement – terminology that McGahan himself rejected. In 1995 McGahan followed up with 1988, a prequel to Praise, partially based on time the author spent working at a lighthouse in the Northern Territory during Australia's bicentennial year.
In 2000, having by his own admission struggled to come up with a third novel, McGahan produced his first work of non-autobiographical fiction: the crime novel Last Drinks, a reflection upon the endemic political corruption in Queensland in the 1980s, and the aftermath of the famous Fitzgerald Inquiry. It won a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. In 2004 McGahan published one of his most successful and respected novels – The White Earth, an epic and gothic tale set in a fictionalised version of the wheat district in which he had grown up. It became another bestseller, and won a raft of literary awards, in particular the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 came Underground, an absurdist satire attacking the more extreme manifestations of the War on Terror in Australia. It received mixed reviews and caused conservative commentator Andrew Bolt to declare McGahan an "unhinged propagandist".
In 2009 he wrote Wonders of a Godless World, a work entirely without dialogue or proper nouns and delving into such topics as geology, weather and immortality and madness. It won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Science Fiction. In 2011 McGahan published The Coming of the Whirlpool, Book 1 of Ship Kings, a fantasy seafaring series. This was followed by Book 2, The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice in 2012, and Book 3, The War of the Four Isles in 2014. The fourth and final volume in the series, The Ocean of the Dead, was released in 2016.

Other writing

Stage

In 1992, while serving a residency at the Queensland Theatre Company, McGahan wrote the play Bait, which was first performed by Renegade Theatre Company in Brisbane in 1995, directed by Shaun Charles, and which won a Matilda award that year. The play is set in a grim Social Security mailing room and concludes the "Gordon Trilogy" – finishing off the story of Gordon Buchanan that was begun in the novels Praise and 1988.
In 2009 McGahan co-wrote and co-directed with Shaun Charles a stage version of The White Earth for La Boite Theatre Company in Brisbane. Both stageplays, Bait and The White Earth, have been published by Playlab Press.
In 2006, McGahan's novel Last Drinks was performed at La Boite Theatre Company in an adaptation by Shaun Charles.

Screen

McGahan wrote the screenplay for the feature film adaptation of Praise, featuring Sacha Horler and Peter Fenton, directed by John Curran and released in 1999. The film won multiple awards, including an AFI Award to McGahan for the screenwriting.

Personal life

McGahan lived in Melbourne, with his partner of many years, Liesje. He died of pancreatic cancer, aged 52, on 1 February 2019.

Awards