Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941, and now lives in Sydney. He is the author of three novels and a book of short stories, The Drover's Wife and Other Stories. Homesickness, his first novel, won the National Book Award for Australian Literature and the Melbourne Age Book of the Year Award. His subsequent novel, Holden's Performance, won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Eucalyptus, which was published by Harvill in 1998, was the winner of the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.