LNL Summer: The misadventures of John Lang - Australia’s trail-blazing first novelist
Description
Author Henry Savery is credited with being Australia's first novelist, for his work 'Quintus Servinton', but author and historian Sean Doyle says in fact the first Autralian-born novelist was John Lang. Lang was born in a Parramatta pub in 1816 and his 1836 novel called 'Violet; Or, the Danseuse: A Portraiture of Human Passion and Character' was published anonymously in London. It was quite a feat for a twenty-year old. Lang went on to write twenty novels, a number of serials, a travelogue of India and to run a newspaper that would eventually hire a young Rudyard Kipling. Now his extraordinary life has been chronicled in a new biography.
Guest: Sean Doyle, author of ‘Australia’s trail-blazing first novelist - John Lang”, published by Big Sky publishing.
This story originally aired on 15 August 2024.
United States
