15 Facts About Randolph Stow

Julian Randolph Stow was an Australian-born writer, novelist and poet.

Randolph Stow taught English literature at the University of Adelaide, the University of Western Australia and the University of Leeds.

Randolph Stow worked on an Aboriginal mission in the Kimberley, which he used as background for his third novel To the Islands.

Randolph Stow further worked as an assistant to an anthropologist, Charles Julius, and as a cadet patrol officer in the Trobriand Islands off the east coast of New Guinea.

Randolph Stow first visited England in 1960 and lived there for a few years, although he returned several times to Australia.

Randolph Stow died in England on 29 May 2010 of a pulmonary embolism, having been diagnosed with liver cancer.

The regional stories Randolph Stow used for the novel were collected by William of Newburgh, Gervase of Tilbury, Gerald the Welshman, Ralph Coggeshall, Roger Howden, and Walter Map.

Randolph Stow conducted research in advance of publication for several years.

In 1978, he and John Constable's great-great-grandson were in a serious car accident, which finally spurred Randolph Stow to begin writing the novel.

Randolph Stow was influenced by the focus on particular places in English Victorian literature and set the entire novel in Suffolk.

Randolph Stow engages in what Duckworth calls "Australian medievalism," drawing connections between the Middle Ages and postcolonial Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Randolph Stow was awarded the Patrick White Award in 1979.

Stow's great-grandfather was Randolph Isham Stow, a judge on the Supreme Court of South Australia and Attorney-General of South Australia; a great-great-uncle, Jefferson Stow was prominent as an explorer of northern Australia, and Stow's great-great-grandfather, the Rev Thomas Quinton Stow, was a pioneering Congregational minister in South Australia.

The Randolph Stow family was from Suffolk, where they had owned land for several generations before Thomas Randolph Stow was appointed the colonial missionary to South Australia by the London Colonial Missionary Society in 1836.

Randolph Stow grew up very interested in the traditional stories and histories of the region.