David George Joseph Malouf was born of a Lebanese Christian father and a Jewish mother of Portuguese origin on the 20th of March, 1934 in a private hospital in South Brisbane, Australia. His father’s family had arrived from Lebanon to Australia in the 1880s. His mother’s family was Sephardic Jews from Spain and had gone to England via Holland, before migrating to Australia in 1913. Malouf first attended Brisbane Grammar School and then completed his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Queensland in 1955. He lectured for a short period of time and when he was 24, like many young Australians during this period, he travelled overseas, moving to London to teach at Holland Park Comprehensive School from where he relocated to Brikenhead …show more content…
These books, he himself confessed, taught him about sex and also revealed to him that there was an amazingly passionate life to be experienced. As a child of about seven years, he began writing and publishing his work in a neighbourhood newspaper. Malouf’s attempt to become a poet during his teenage years was inpired by his reading of Kenneth Slessor's poetry. One of Malouf’s friends, Judith Rodriguez, sent some of Malouf's early poems to Clem Christesen, who was the then editor of the literary journal Meanjin. His first poem was published in 1960. In 1962, along with three other poets, namely, Don Maynard, Judith Green (later Rodriguez), and Rodney Hall, he was one of the poets represented in Four Poets. Malouf's first solo collection, Bicycle and other Poems, was published in the UQP Paperback Poets series in 1970. But the work that confirmed Malouf's reputation as one of Australia's leading poets was his next collection, Neighbours in a Thicket (1974), which not only won that year's Townsville Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Award, but also the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and even the Grace Leven Poetry