Blanche d'Alpuget
Ms d'Alpuget is a biographer, novelist and essayist and has won a number
of awards, both for fiction and non-fiction, including, in 1987, the
prestigious inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature.
Ms d'Alpuget has been Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Australian Society
of Authors, a board member of the A.C.T. Arts Advisory Council, the
Copyright Agency Limited, and the Australian Film Commission. Austcare
named her Goodwill Ambassador in 1992, a post which she filled until
1995, writing and speaking about the plight of refugees from Indochina,
the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
In 1995 she joined the board of Robert J L Hawke and Associates, a business consultancy primarily focussed on working in China.
As an Australian novelist and acclaimed biographer her works include Mediator: a biography of Sir Richard Kirby (1977); Monkeys in the dark (1980); Turtle Beach (1981) which won the Age book award in 1981; Robert J Hawke:a biography (1982);Winter in Jerusalem (1986) and White Eye (1993). Turtle Beach became a feature film in 1992 featuring Greta Scacchi and Jack Thompson and all her novels have been translated into other languages. In 2008 Ms d’Alpuget’s essay On Longing was published.