“I’ve been committed to writing since I was 21, 13 years,” Alex Miller wrote in his diary in 1971. “Quite a stretch considering I’ve yet to publish. Still, the seed is eternal.” Another diary entry, from 1975: “Am I a writer? If I write I am. If I don’t I’m not.” In 1976: “No juice for the publishers, nothing to set their hair on end. Anyhow; next time. Eh?”
That young man’s words, scribbled in slanted hand decades ago, feel profound when you know it took Miller a further 17 years to publish his first novel, aged 52; that he’d go on to win Australia’s biggest literary award, the Miles Franklin – twice, for The Ancestor Game and Journey to the Stone Country; and that he would one day come to be regarded as among Australia’s greatest living novelists.
