Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian novelist and playwright who explored themes of religious experience, personal identity and the conflict between visionary individuals and a materialistic, conformist society. Influenced by the modernism of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, he developed a complex literary style and a body of work that challenged the dominant realist prose tradition of his home country, was satirical of Australian society, and sharply divided local critics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 and is the only Australian to receive it. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973, announced October 25, 1973. Patrick White, “for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature”. Patrick White: born 1912, London, United Kingdom. Wiki link Data: the Nobel Foundation (CC0).