Conference-ville
By (Author) Frank Moorhouse
Random House Australia
Vintage (Australia)
1st September 2008
Australia
General
Fiction
A823'.3
Paperback
160
Width 130mm, Height 202mm, Spine 11mm
134g
As the conference participants settle in with their name tags and satchels, as they sort out amongst themselves their seating arrangements and gently jostle for positions at the bar bistro, as they brace themselves for the first confrontation between opposing factions, award-winning writer Frank Moorhouse wryly observes the subtle shifts in their allegiances and pretensions. Using this neat microcosmic device to fullest advantage, Moorhouse shrewdly explores the limitations of Australian intellectual life and, as in The Americans, Baby and The Electrical Experience, displays his brilliant grasp of social interplay.
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator but in the 1970s became a full-time writer. He has written twelve books of fiction and one non-fiction book. He has won a number of literary prizes including the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal for 1989. FORTY-SEVENTEEN was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in the New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and 'moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. GRAND DAYS, the first of the Palais des Nations novels, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. DARK PALACE won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.