Arts
Christopher Koch: A Biography
Introduction
He’s my favourite because he wrote with great purity. His writing is never flamboyant, and he never showed off. In a 2007 radio interview, he said:
“I think that, in the novel, you should say what you have to say as clearly as you can. Saying it clearly may not always be simple, but generally it should be.”
I discovered him when my grandmother lent me her copy of his last novel, Lost Voices, in 2013. I’ve since read all his books.
His life
Koch during the 1980s.
Christopher Koch was born in 1932, and grew up in New Town. He attended Clemes College, St. Virgil’s College, Hobart High School, and the University of Tasmania.
He aspired to become a comic strip artist when he was young. He was eventually employed by The Mercury as a caricaturist.
But he soon realised that the novel was ‘the supreme comic strip’. He started writing his first novel, The Boys in the Island, while he was studying at the University of Tasmania.
After graduating from university in 1954 with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours, Koch travelled through south Asia and Europe. He ended up in London, where he worked as a waiter and a teacher for a period of time before returning to Australia.
While in London, he finished writing The Boys in the Island, and he sent it to a publisher. It was published in 1958, shortly after he returned to Australia.
Koch married in 1959, and he and his wife had a son in 1962.
After winning a writing fellowship in the early-1960s, Koch worked on and eventually published his second novel, Across the Sea Wall, at Stanford University in the United States. It was at Stanford that he met fellow authors Ken Kesey and Frank O’Connor, among others.
After Across the Sea Wall was published, Koch returned to Australia and took up a job as a radio producer at the ABC in Sydney. Because of the demands of raising a family and being a full-time radio producer, he had no time to write, which was his passion.
The Year of Living Dangerously became a bestseller after it was published, and was adapted into a film starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver in 1982. Koch subsequently enjoyed a successful career as a writer.
Koch was a perfectionist, often re-writing, re-writing, and re-writing his work again to ensure that readers were going to get novels of the highest quality. For example, Highways to a War, along with its companion novel Out of Ireland, took him seven years to write.
He divorced during the 1980s, but remarried in the 1990s. He died from cancer in 2013, aged 81.
Legacy
Koch has a huge reputation in the literary world, and is considered by his fans as Australia’s best writer of prose ever.
All his books (eight novels and two books of non-fiction), especially The Year of Living Dangerously, have sold well. Two of his novels (The Doubleman and Highways to a War) won Australia’s top literary award, the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
In 1990, Koch received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Tasmania. Then, in 1995, he was then made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to Australian literature.
Conclusion
I’ve picked up quite a few things about the craft of writing from reading Koch’s books. I believe my fellow writers will be able to pick up a thing or two as well, so I strongly encourage them to read his books. I’d personally recommend starting with Highways to a War, which is about the search for a war photographer who, in 1976, disappears inside Khmer Rouge Cambodia.
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The trailer for the film adaptation of The Year of Living Dangerously:
