Visitants

A brilliant, ambitious novel.’ * Sydney Morning Herald *<br />Tautly and vibrantly written, and brilliantly evocative of its Trobriand Islands setting.’ * Australian Book Review *
Storytelling at its very best...An extraordinary novel.’ * Boston Globe *<br />It is a rare pleasure for those of us who are already fans to have these works at our disposal…[Stow was] the most talented and celebrated Australian author of the post-White generation.’ * Monthly *
It should be taken as no commentary on contemporary Oz Lit that I choose Text's fistful of Randolph Stow reissues for my local favourite(s) during 2015. Their appearance reminds us that a gentle, wise, wounded, and immensely talented poet in prose once lived among us.' * Geordie Williamson, Australian Book Review, Books of the Year 2015 *<br />Stow is an exceptional writer, truly gifted at capturing the natural environment as well as the essential physical and psychological characteristics of his characters. What makes his work memorable however is his examination of human connections…Beautiful.’ * Salty Popcorn *

Julian Randolph `Mick’ Stow (1935–2010) was born in Geraldton, Western Australia. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth.

While at university, Stow’s first collection of poems, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957. The following year, his third novel, To the Islands, also won the Gold Medal and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow later reworked this novel for a second edition but did not allow its two predecessors to be republished.

Stow worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea, an experience that informed his later novel Visitants. He also lectured at universities in Australia and England, lived in America on a Harkness fellowship, and published his second collection of verse, Outrider. During the 1960s, he also released the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided, and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite.

For many years, Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti, and reviews. In 1969, he settled permanently in England, first in Suffolk, then in Essex. He received the Patrick White Award in 1979.

Randolph Stow died in 2010 at the age of seventy-four. A private man and a prodigiously gifted author, he has been hailed as “the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead.”

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