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Alex Miller

The Ruin of Time

Professor Robert Dixon author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Sydney University Press

Published:26th Aug '14

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Alex Miller cover

Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time is the first sole-authored critical survey of the respected Australian novelist's eleven novels. While these books are immediately accessible to the general reading public, they are manifestly works of high literary seriousness substantial, technically masterful and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight.

Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time is the first sole-authored critical survey of the respected Australian novelist’s eleven novels. While these books are immediately accessible to the general reading public, they are manifestly works of high literary seriousness – substantial, technically masterful and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight.

Among his many prizes and awards, Alex Miller has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for The Ancestor Game in 1993, and Journey to the Stone Country in 2003; the Commonwealth Writers’ prize, also for The Ancestor Game in 1993; and the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize, for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and Lovesong in 2011. He received a Centenary Medal in 2001 and the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Having published his eleventh novel, Coal Creek, in 2013 – which won the Victorian Premier’s Fiction Award in 2014 – Miller is currently writing an autobiographical memoir with the working title Horizons.

'Despite its many immediate rewards The Ruin of Time is a book that will have a long shelf-life. It is not (of course) the final word on Alex Miller, but due to its compendious nature it will become the ‘go to’ source for future readers or critics looking to navigate his body of work. It is thoughtful, knowledgeable, studious, engaging and entertaining, and in writing it Dixon has further enhanced both his own reputation and that of his subject.'

-- Paul Genoni * Journal of Australian Studies *

'Dixon’s Alex Miller is a sustained and impressive appreciation of an Australian novelist who, although much decorated, and despite his considerable skills as an actor and public performer, remains a more elusive figure than his contemporaries Tom Keneally and Peter Carey.'

-- Peter Pierce * The Australian *

'In Dixon, Miller finds a reader of generosity, curiosity, intelligence and grace, one who in turn opens the work for others’ access and consideration. Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time enacts the lucid reading Celan hopes for, and offers its readers, in turn, illumination.'

-- Felicity Plunkett * Souther

  • Joint winner of the Walter McRae Russell Prize 2015

ISBN: 9781743324073

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

214 pages