The Story
Visitants — Randolph Stow (with episodes from other novels, poems, stories, interviews and essays)
Randolph Stow is one of the great unsung figures of Australian literature — a writer of extraordinary precision and strangeness whose work slips between poetry and prose, between the ancient and the contemporary, between the real and the inexplicable. This collection gathers his finest novel at its centre — Visitants, set in Papua New Guinea in 1959, where mysterious lights in the sky arrive over a colonial outpost already fraying at its edges — and surrounds it with the full range of his gifts: episodes from the other novels that made his reputation, the spare and luminous poetry, stories that resist easy categorisation, and interviews and essays that reveal the intelligence and the restlessness behind the work.
Stow won the Miles Franklin Award, was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and spent decades being quietly admired by writers who knew exactly how good he was. This collection is the case for a wider audience — for readers who want Australian fiction that asks hard questions about landscape, belonging, and what lies just beyond the edge of the knowable. Essential.
Description
Visitants — Randolph Stow (with episodes from other novels, poems, stories, interviews and essays)
Randolph Stow is one of the great unsung figures of Australian literature — a writer of extraordinary precision and strangeness whose work slips between poetry and prose, between the ancient and the contemporary, between the real and the inexplicable. This collection gathers his finest novel at its centre — Visitants, set in Papua New Guinea in 1959, where mysterious lights in the sky arrive over a colonial outpost already fraying at its edges — and surrounds it with the full range of his gifts: episodes from the other novels that made his reputation, the spare and luminous poetry, stories that resist easy categorisation, and interviews and essays that reveal the intelligence and the restlessness behind the work.
Stow won the Miles Franklin Award, was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and spent decades being quietly admired by writers who knew exactly how good he was. This collection is the case for a wider audience — for readers who want Australian fiction that asks hard questions about landscape, belonging, and what lies just beyond the edge of the knowable. Essential.
