A jury consisting of ten writers, translators and critics, representing nine countries and cultures has selected David Malouf as the 16th laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. 

Malouf was born of Lebanese and British parents in Brisbane in 1934 and was educated at Brisbane grammar school and the University of Queensland, where he taught for two years after graduation. He spent the next decade, from 1959 to 1968, in England and Italy, returning to Australian 1968, where he took a position teaching English at the University of Sydney. In 1977, he again left for Europe, resettling in Tuscany and devoting himself to full-time writing. He continued to divide his time between Australia and Italy for the next twenty years.

Malouf first achieved recognition as a poet with such collections as Bicycle and Other Poems, Neighbours in a Thicket, The Year of the Foxes, First Things Last, and Wild Lemons. Selected Poems, Gesture of a Hand, and We Took Their Orders and Are Dead, and is the author of the libretto of Richard Meale's opera Voss, based on Patrick White's novel of the same name.

His greatest fame, however, has come through his novellas and novels, beginning with Johnno and An Imaginary Life. Four novellas were published together in 1981 and 1982, including Fly Away Peter and Child's Play, Harland's Half-Acre, a lyrical, transitional work, and Antipodes, a volume of short fiction, appeared in 1984 and 1985 respectively. Other works followed, including The Great World, about the experiences of two men held captive in the infamous World War II Japanese prison camp at Changi; Remembering Babylon, which presents a lyrical case study of a white man living with and among the Aborigines; and Conversations at Curlow Creek, in which a troubled British officer interrogates a condemned enlistee and deserter during the latter's final hours, discovering more than he ever imagined about the pervasiveness of violence and cruelty in late nineteenth-century life Down Under. Untold Tales, a new collection, appeared in 1999.

Ihab Hassan, Egyptian-born American critic and scholar of multicultural-international range who serves as Vilas Research Professor of English and comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, championed the winning nominee. In his nomination he observed that Malouf's work, compellingly universal in appeal, carries the signature of an original temperament. The master themes of Malouf are easy to discern: history, nature, love, art, human identity, the spirits' unappeased quest to reckon with the finalities of existence.