Dal Stivens

Dal Stivens (31 December 1911 – 16 June 1997) was an Australian writer.

After serving in the army during the war, from 1944 to 1949, Stivens was on the staff of the Australian Department of Information. He served in the press office at Australia House in London until 1950. He was Foundation President of the Australian Society of Authors, in 1963^[1] and was involved in the creation of the Public Lending Right in 1975.^[1]

He was also a keen amateur naturalist. From 1974 he painted a substantial amount of his time.

Stivens won the Miles Franklin Award for best Australian novel in 1970 for A Horse of Air and was winner of the Patrick White Award for 1981 for the contribution of his novels Jimmy Brockett and A Horse of Air, and his short stories. In 1994, he was honoured with a Special Achievement Award in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.^[2]

Dal also wrote under the pseudonyms Jack Tarrant, John Sidney, Sam Johnson and L'Arva Street.^[2]

Dal died in Sydney on 15 June 1997 after many years of domesticity in Lindfield, NSW, with Juanita Cragen, to whom he left his literary estate. On her death in 2007, Juanita left the estate to the Australian Society of Authors as the Dal Stivens Bequest.^[2]

Bibliography

Novels

• Jimmy Brockett (aka The Entrepreneur) (1951)
• The Wide Arch (1958)
• Three Persons Make a Tiger (1968)
• A Horse of Air (1970)
• Well Anyway (written 1930s, published 2012)

Children's

• The Bushranger, (1978)

Short story collections

• The Tramp and Other Stories, (1936)
• The Courtship of Uncle Henry, (1946)
• The Gambling Ghost and Other Tales, (1953)
• Ironbark Bill, (1955)
• The Scholarly Mouse and Other Tales, (1957)
• Selected Stories 1936–1968, (1969)
• The Unicorn and Other Tales, (1976)
• The Demon Bowler and Other Cricket Stories, (1979)

Non-fiction

• The Incredible Egg, (Natural History, 1974)

Edited

• Coast to Coast: Australian stories 1957–1958, (1958)

Notes

References

• Goodwin, Ken (1986) A History of Australian Literature ("Macmilllan History of Literature" series), Basingstoke, Macmillan
• https://asauthors.org/dal-stivens-bequest

External links

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