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Christopher Koch

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Christopher John Koch AO Australian novelist, was born in Hobart in 1932. He has twice won the Miles Franklin Award. In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for contribution to Australian literature.

His novel The Year of Living Dangerously, set in Jakarta during the fall of the Sukarno regime, was made into a film directed by Peter Weir and starring Sigourney Weaver, Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt.The book was loosely inspired by his brother's (Philip Koch) experience as an Australian Journalist in Indonesia during that period.

Awards

Miles Franklin Award The Doubleman, winner 1985
Highways to a War, winner 1996
The Memory Room, longlisted 2008
The Age Book of the Year Award The Year of Living Dangerously, 1978 Imaginative Writing Prize winner; 1978 Book of the Year, joint winner
National Book Council Award for Australian Literature The Year of Living Dangerously, 1979
Colin Roderick Award Out of Ireland, 1999
Victorian Premier's Literary Award Out of Ireland, 2000

Books

  • The Boys in the Island (1958, revised ed, Angus & Robertson, 1974)
  • Across the Sea Wall (Heinemann, 1965)
  • The Year of Living Dangerously (Nelson, 1978)
  • The Doubleman (Chatto and Windus, 1985)
  • Crossing the Gap: a novelist’s essays (Hogarth Press, 1993)
  • Highways to a War (Heinemann, 1995)
  • Out of Ireland (Doubleday, 1999)
  • The Memory Room (2007)

Further reading

Noel Henricksen, Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and his books (Educare, 2003).