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As a writer, Patrick White never gave interviews or wrote for magazines and newspapers. His life was private until October 1973 when the Swedish Academy awarded him with the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first and only time an Australian has ever won the award. He had never given an interview for foreign or Australian television and the day after the announcement in Stockholm, White accepted journalist Mike Carlton in his Sydney home and gave this interview for ABC's "Four Corners".
The Swedish Academy say of White: "He is the one who, for the first time, has given the continent of Australia an authentic voice that carries across the world, at the same time as his achievement contributes to the development, both artistic and, as regards ideas, of contemporary literature."
White today is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He was born in London in 1912 from Australian parents, was a close friend in his youth of Irish painter Francis Bacon, was later stationed during WWII in Egypt and later moved to Australia with his partner, Manolis Lascaris, where he became a full-time writer by 1948. By the time he won the Nobel Prize, he had written 9 novels, one short story collection and 4 plays. He passed away in his Centennial Park home in Sydney in 1990.