David Malouf was born in Queensland, Australia, in 1934 to a Lebanese-Christian father and English-Jewish mother.

He graduated from the University of Queensland in 1955. He lectured for a short period before moving to London, where he taught at Holland Park Comprehensive School before relocating to Birkenhead in 1962. He returned to Australia in 1968 and lectured at the University of Sydney. He became a full-time writer in 1978. His first two published books were both collections of poetry: Bicycle and Other Poems (1970) and Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems (1974). His first novel, Johnno (1975), is the semi-autobiographical tale of a young man growing up in Brisbane during the Second World War, a period in Malouf’s life that he later wrote about in his memoir 12 Edmondstone Street (1985). His second novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), is a fictional life of the poet Ovid, exiled from Rome by the Emperor Augustus in 8 A.D. and sent to live in exile among the Scythians on the Black Sea. Child’s Play with Eustace & The Prowler (1982) consists of a novel about terrorism and two short narratives, while Fly Away Peter (1982) contrasts the idyllic setting of a bird sanctuary on the Queensland coast with the horrors of the First World War.

Later novels include Harland’s Half Acre (1985), the story of an artist living in a remote area and his attempt to recover his family’s past through the land; The Great World (1990), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (France) and tells the story of two Australians imprisoned by the Japanese during the Second World War; and the acclaimed Remembering Babylon (1993), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best Book).