David George Joseph Malouf is an acclaimed Australian writer. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Malouf was born in Brisbane, Australia, to a Christian Lebanese father and an English-born mother of Portuguese Sephardi Jewish descent. He was an avid reader as a child, and at 12 years old was reading such books as Wuthering Heights, Bleak House and The Hunchback... of Notre Dame. These books, he says, taught him about sex: "They told you there was a life out there that was amazingly passionate". He attended Brisbane Grammar School and graduated from the University of Queensland in 1955. He lectured for a short period before moving to London, where he taught at Holland Park School before relocating to Birkenhead in 1962. He returned to Australia in 1968 and lectured at the University of Sydney, taught at his old school, and lectured in English at the Universities of Queensland and Sydney.
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