Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse was an Australian writer who won major national prizes for his fiction, non-fiction, and essays. His work has been published in the United Kingdom, France and the United States, and translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian and Swedish. He was born in Nowra, New South Wales on 21 December 1938, the son of James and Laurie McCullough. He had a younger brother, Carl, who drowned in 1965. He attended Holy Cross College, Woollahra and had a strong interest in both science and the humanities. He worked as a teacher, librarian and journalist before studying medicine at the University of Sydney. He suffered from dermatitis and had to abandon his dream of becoming a doctor. He switched to neuroscience and worked at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In 1963, he moved to the United Kingdom and joined the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. He met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University who offered him a research associate job at Yale. He spent 10 years researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. While at Yale he wrote his first two books: Tim (1974), a novel about the relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man with intellectual disability; and The Thorn Birds (1977), a sweeping saga of three generations of an Australian family that became an international bestseller and one of the best selling books in history, with sales of over 30 million copies worldwide. The Thorn Birds was also adapted into a television miniseries in 1983 that became one of the most-watched miniseries of all time. Moorhouse returned to Australia in 1976 and settled on Norfolk Island, a self-governing territory of Australia. He continued to write novels in various genres, including historical fiction, fantasy, romance, crime and science fiction. His most ambitious work was the Masters of Rome series (1990-2007), a seven-volume fictionalized account of the life and times of Julius Caesar and his contemporaries, based on extensive research and historical sources. The series was praised for its accuracy, detail and vivid portrayal of ancient Rome. Moorhouse also wrote The Ladies of Missalonghi (1987), a novel set in the Blue Mountains that was accused of plagiarism by L.M. Montgomery's heirs; An Indecent Obsession (1981), a novel about a psychiatric ward in World War II that was adapted into a film in 1985; Morgan's Run (2000), a novel about the First Fleet and the founding of Australia; The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet (2008), a sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; Bittersweet (2013), a novel about four sisters who become nurses in the 1920s; and The Courage and the Will (2014), an autobiography that was published posthumously. Moorhouse received several awards and honours for his contribution to literature and culture, such as the Order of Australia (AO) in 1984, the Doctor of Letters from Macquarie University in 1993, the Doctor of Letters from Charles Sturt University in 2002, the Doctor of Letters from University of New England in 2004, the Centenary Medal in 2003, and the Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006. He also established a legacy fund for Norfolk Island to support its health care system. He married Ric Robinson, an islander and former Pitcairn descendant, in 1984 and had no children. He suffered from various health problems, including diabetes, osteoporosis, macular degeneration and cancer. He died on 26 June 2022 at the age of 83 at a hospital in Sydney.