Malouf to explore Shakespeare’s “drama of the mind”

Brisbane-born author and former University of Queensland student and lecturer, David Malouf, will address the VIII World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane this month.

Dr Malouf will explore the qualifications needed by a writer when addressing the Congress on “Shakespeare the Writer”.

“People sometimes assume Shakespeare couldn’t have written those plays because he didn’t, within the terms of that time, have enough education,” Dr Malouf said.

“(However) he had an education of exactly the kind he needed.

“He was a literate person but he was living in a society where you acquired experience by listening, by overhearing things, by picking up in a particularly sensory way.”

The World Shakespeare Congress is held every five years. Next month UQ will host it in Brisbane – the first Southern Hemisphere venue in its 30-year-history.

Dr Malouf said Shakespeare educated his audience over 20 years to deal with the complex form of drama he created.

“It was a drama of inwardness, of what is going on in the mind, rather than what was going on in terms of action. Presumably the audience went all the way with him and I find that very interesting.”

He remembers first reading Shakespeare’s works and being “absolutely transported by those plays” when he was 10, after receiving a small compendium of the Bard’s plays.

Dr Malouf said UQ English Literature students would have the added benefit of the Congress being hosted by UQ this year.

“They are in a place where the work they are doing now is taken very seriously,” he said.

“I hope the Congress will expose them to a very, very wide range of ideas about Shakespeare that you can’t always easily pick up being settled in one place.”

Dr Malouf attended UQ and studied English in the early 50s. He taught at the University as a junior English lecturer in 1955 and 1957.

He was awarded an Order of Australia and in 1997 was declared a national living treasure. In 1992 UQ selected him as its first Alumnus of the Year and awarded him an honorary doctorate.

He is one of the leading novelists writing in English today and has been translated into Arabic, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.

His works include a reworking of the classical legend of Ovid among the Goths, An Imaginary Life (1978) and an Australian perspective on the Irish Diaspora, The Conversations at Curlew Creek (1996).

He has received many international awards including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Lannan Literary Award (US), both in 2000.

His study of Aboriginal-white relations in nineteenth-century Australia, Remembering Babylon, won the Los Angeles Times’ Book Prize in 1994, the 1995 Prix Baudelaire (France) and the 1996 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

David Malouf is also a leading public intellectual and commentator. In 2004 he was short listed for the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate for Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance.

David Malouf will present the Plenary session, “Shakespeare the Writer”, at Brisbane City Hall on Friday July 21st at 9am.

To hear David Malouf go to: http://www.sjc.uq.edu.au/shakespeare/davidmalouf.mp3

For more information on the VIII World Shakespeare Congress go to: www.shakespeare2006.net

Media: For further information, contact VIII World Shakespeare Congress Senior Program Manager Melissa Western (telephone 07 3365 1125, melissa.western@uq.edu.au), or Fiona Kennedy at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 1088, mobile 0413 380 012).