Patrick White was born in London to Australian parents, both of whom came from well-heeled farming families in the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney. White was educated at Moss Vale in New South Wales and in Britain, where he read literature at King's College, Cambridge. He served as an intelligence officer in the Middle East and Africa during the war, returning to Australia at the end of the conflict. For much of his life, White was psychologically divided between Australia, Europe and England.

Patrick White (1912-90)-awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1973 ' for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature '.

White's early novels, including The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957) and Riders in the Chariot (1961), were critically acclaimed in Britain and the United States and quickly translated into other languages. In the early 1960s, he oversaw the debuts of a number of his plays, including The Ham Funeral (1961), The Season at Sarsparilla (1962), A Cheery Soul (1963) and A Night on Bald Mountain (1964). Later works included The Solid Mandala (1966), The Vivisector (1970), The Eye of the Storm (1973) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976).