The Glass Canoe

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award 1976. Introduction by Nicolas Rothwell.

Meat Man is a regular at the Southern Cross pub in Sydney. With his tribe he sits and drinks and watches as life spirals around him.

David Ireland’s novel tells his stories, about the pub, its patrons and their women, about the brutal, tender and unexpected places his glass canoe takes him.

David Ireland was born in 1927 in south-western Sydney. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for Archimedes and the Seagull. David Ireland lives in New South Wales.

Nicolas Rothwell is the author of Heaven and Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Journeys to the Interior and The Red Highway. He is the northern correspondent for the Australian.

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‘In a flash of inspired vision David Ireland has perceived that the real centre of Australian life…is the pub…which the novelist demonstrates and enlarges upon with great verve and menace and macabre humour.’ National Times