Julian Randolph Stow (28 November 1935 – 29 May 2010) was an Australian-born writer, novelist and poet.

Early life

Born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Randolph Stow was the son of Mary Campbell Stow née Sewell and Cedric Ernest Stow, a lawyer.

The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980)

The Girl Green as Elderflower is often considered to be closely linked to Stow's life. After dealing with a bout of malaria in Papua New Guinea, he moved to East Bergholt in Suffolk in England from 1969 to 1981, his ancestral county, and he used traditional tales from that area, many of which he translated from Latin himself, to inform his novel. Many of the characters in the novel are based on Stow's friends. He conducted research in advance of publication for several years. In 1978, he and John Constable's great-great-grandson were in a serious car accident, which finally spurred Stow to begin writing the novel. On New Year's Day 1979, he began writing and finished thirty-two days later.

Awards and legacy

His novel To the Islands won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. He was awarded the Patrick White Award in 1979. As well as producing fiction, poetry, and numerous book reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, he also wrote libretti for musical theatre works by Peter Maxwell Davies.

A considerable number of Randolph Stow's poems are listed in the State Library of Western Australia online catalogue with indications where they have been anthologised.

Personal life and family

Julian Randolph Stow's paternal grandfather was Francis Leslie Stow, a Crown Solicitor of Western Australia. Stow's great-grandfather was Randolph Isham Stow, a judge on the Supreme Court of South Australia and Attorney-General of South Australia; a great-great-uncle, Jefferson Stow was prominent as an explorer of northern Australia, and Stow's great-great-grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Quinton Stow, was a pioneering Congregational minister in South Australia.

Stow's mother's family settled in Australia in the 1830s and were some of the earliest to arrive. His great-grandfather, George Sewell, arrived in Australia in 1835; soon after, the rest of his family relocated from Essex to Australia. Sewell eventually moved from Perth to Geraldton, where his descendants remained.

Awards list

  • Australian Literature Society gold medal, 1957, 1958
  • 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award
  • Britannica–Australia award, 1966
  • Grace Leven Prize, 1969
  • 1979 Patrick White Award
  • 1989 The Randolph Stow Young Writers Award was established in his honour to encourage school students in the Geraldton region of Western Australia to write.

Selected works

Novels

  • A Haunted Land (1956)
  • The Bystander (1957)
  • To the Islands (1958) (revised in 1982)
  • Tourmaline (1963)
  • The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965)
  • Visitants (1979)
  • The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980)
  • The Suburbs of Hell (1984)

Poetry

  • Act One (1957)
  • Outrider: Poems 1956–1962 (1962)
  • A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems (1969)
  • The Land's Meaning: New Selected Poems ed. John Kinsella

Children's

  • Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy 1967

Musical theatre

  • Eight Songs for a Mad King 1969, libretto
  • Miss Donnithorne's Maggot 1974, libretto

Selected list of poems

{|class='wikitable sortable' width='100%'

|-

!|Title

!|Year

!|First published

!|Reprinted/collected in

|-

| "The Land's Meaning"

| 1962

| Australian Poetry 1962 edited by Geoffrey Dutton

| Outrider : Poems, 1956-1962 by Randolph Stow, illustrated<br>by Sidney Nolan, MacDonald, 1962, pp. 20-21

|-

|}

Notes

Bibliography

  • Carey, Gabrielle Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family, University of Queensland Press, 2014
  • Falkiner, Suzanne Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, University of Western Australia Press, 2016
  • Randolph Stow – Writer
  • Graeme Kinross-Smith 'Randolph Stow: a Photo essay' JASAL 10, 2010
  • David Fonteyn Ecological Allegory: Tourmaline, an Example' JASAL 10 (2010)
  • Kerry Leves ' Toxic flowers: Randolph Stow's unfused horizons' JASAL 10 (2010)
  • Bernadette Brennan 'Words of Water: Reading Otherness in Tourmaline and Oyster ' JASAL 3 (2004)