13 Facts About Blanche d'Alpuget

Josephine Blanche d'Alpuget was born on 3 January 1944 and is an Australian writer and the second wife of Bob Hawke, the longest-serving Labor Prime Minister of Australia.

Blanche d'Alpuget's great-aunt, Blanche d'Alpuget, after whom she was named, was a pioneer woman journalist in Sydney and a patron of artists.

Blanche d'Alpuget's father was a sports and feature writer and news editor of a Sydney newspaper, The Sun.

Blanche d'Alpuget worked at The Sun's rival newspaper, The Daily Mirror, then moved to Indonesia at the age of 22 with her first husband, Tony Pratt, whom she had married in 1965.

Blanche d'Alpuget and Pratt have a son, Louis, an artist and sculptor and a co-founder of Mungo, a Sydney artists' colony.

Blanche d'Alpuget was the world's youngest member of the famous English-founded Oriental Ceramic Society.

Blanche d'Alpuget travelled widely, and to remote areas, in both countries.

In 1973 Blanche d'Alpuget returned to Australia and became active in the women's movement.

Blanche d'Alpuget began writing in 1974, inspired by her experiences in South East Asia and has won a number of literary awards for both fiction and non-fiction including, in 1987, the inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature.

Between 1979 and 1982 Blanche d'Alpuget researched and wrote a biography of Hawke.

For fifteen years Blanche d'Alpuget abandoned her career as a writer and travelled the world with her new husband, visiting not only capital cities but remote areas of China, Inner Mongolia, Moldova, Easter Island, Palau, Kazakhstan, the North West Frontier of Pakistan and the Antarctic peninsula.

In 2013 Blanche d'Alpuget released The Young Lion, the first novel of a quintet.

Blanche d'Alpuget's narrative is so fresh and energetic you will swear she's bringing us a first-hand account.