2012
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
David Marr (left) and Robert Dessaix (right) at Sydney Writers' Festival.
2012
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
David Marr (left) and Robert Dessaix (right) at Sydney Writers' Festival.
https://www.amazon.com/Turgenev-Quest-Faith-Robert-Dessaix/dp/0908160550/?tag=2022091-20
1980
https://www.amazon.com/Picador-writing-Dessaix-Robert-Daniel/dp/0330273973/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(In this landmark collection of Australian writing spannin...)
In this landmark collection of Australian writing spanning well over a century, and Australia emerges which is radically different from the clichDed land of bronzed lifeguares and long-suffering sheepfarmers' wives.
https://www.amazon.com/Australian-Gay-Lesbian-Writing-Anthology/dp/019553686X/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(In this touching memoir, Robert Dessaix recounts the stor...)
In this touching memoir, Robert Dessaix recounts the story of a most unusual childhood on Sydney’s North Shore, of his fascination with Russia and the years he spent studying in Cold War Moscow, and of his restless wanderings around the world.
https://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Disgrace-Robert-Dessaix/dp/1925589021/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(A series of letters written by a seriously ill man, stric...)
A series of letters written by a seriously ill man, stricken with an incurable disease and residing in Italy, to his friend back home in Australia explore the sensuality and debauchery that underlie European literature.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312169507/?tag=2022091-20
1996
https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Drusilla-Modjeska/dp/0330360884/?tag=2022091-20
1997
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0732909430/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(A book based on the highly regarded Australian Radio Nati...)
A book based on the highly regarded Australian Radio National series, " Rethinking Australia: Intellectuals and the public culture".
https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Their-Minds-Robert-Dessaix/dp/0733306535/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(One Easter a young actor, far from home, rents a house fr...)
One Easter a young actor, far from home, rents a house from a writer he's never heard of called Kester Berwick, and becomes fascinated by the absent Berwick's rootless, self-invented existence. Gradually, he finds his own life strangely echoing the absent writer's, as Corfu's eccentric expatriate community opens up to him.
https://www.amazon.com/Corfu-Robert-Dessaix/dp/0743220390/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Together with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev was ...)
Together with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev was one of the leading novelists of Russia’s Golden Age and the first Russian writer to capture a Western audience. In Russia works such as his A Hunter’s Notes and Fathers and Sons, were pivotal in transforming the Russian social landscape. No less sensational than his novels was his personal life. For forty years, until the day he died, he was passionately devoted to the diva Pauline Viardot, following her and her husband around Europe and even living with them amicably at times as part of their household.
https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Love-Turgenev-Robert-Dessaix/dp/1593760639/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(As I Was Saying is a swirling conversation with the reade...)
As I Was Saying is a swirling conversation with the reader on everything from travel to dogs and cats, from sport and swearing to the pleasures of idleness.
https://www.amazon.com/As-Was-Saying-Robert-Dessaix-ebook/dp/B00774BWFY/?tag=2022091-20
2012
https://www.amazon.com/What-Days-Are-Robert-Dessaix/dp/0857985760/?tag=2022091-20
2014
(One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, Ro...)
One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, Robert Dessaix chanced upon the castle where the 20th-century French writer Andre Gide spent his childhood. Recalling the excitement he felt when he first read Gide as a teenager, Dessaix sets off to recapture what it was that once drew him so strongly to this enigmatic figure. On a magic carpet ride from Lisbon to the edge of the Sahara, from Paris to the south of France and Algiers, he takes us to the places where the Nobel Prize winning author, in ways still scandalous to modern sensibilities, lived out his unconventional ideas about love, marriage, sexuality and religion.
https://www.amazon.com/Arabesques-Double-Lives-Robert-Dessaix/dp/1925589005/?tag=2022091-20
2017
(Robert Dessaix shows, in this wonderfully thoughtful and ...)
Robert Dessaix shows, in this wonderfully thoughtful and witty book, how taking leisure seriously gives us back our freedom - to enjoy life, to revel in it, in fact; to deepen our sense of who we are as human beings. He explains how we can reclaim our right to 'rest well', and to loaf, groom, nest and play, as he guides us through the history of leisure. The result is a terrifically lively and engaging conversation that reminds us that at leisure we are at our most intensely and pleasurably human.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MYU4Q8A/?tag=2022091-20
2017
educator broadcaster journalist translator writer
Robert Dessaix was born on February 17, 1944 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He was adopted at an early age by Tom and Jean Jones, after which he was known as Robert Jones. Tom Jones, a merchant seaman, was already 55 when Robert was adopted.
Robert Dessaix went to Lane Cove Public School and Artarmon Opportunity School (remembered warmly in "What Days Are For"). He was also educated at North Sydney Boys High School from 1956 to 1960.
After a year at Sydney University, he moved to Canberra to major in Russian language and literature, which he had studied privately for the Leaving Certificate while at high school, at the Australian National University.
Moreover, he spent the next 23 years of his life, on and off, in Canberra, studying for his Master of Arts and Ph.D. both at the Australian National University.
Robert Dessaix taught and wrote about Russian literature at Moscow University. Eventually, he moved to Sydney to teach at the University of NSW. His love of Russian literature informs all his work.
While teaching, he joined the Griffin Theatre Company in Kings Cross at the very beginning of its existence. Here he met the artistic director of the Nimrod Theatre Company Aubrey Mellor and together they set about translating many of Anton Chekhov’s major plays for productions in theatres around the country. Additionally, he translated a number of Russian books into English in collaboration with Michael Ulman, including The Sheepskin Coat and An Absolutely Happy Village by Boris Vakhtin.
In early 1982 in Sydney, he also met his present partner, the writer Peter Timms, at that time curator at the Powerhouse Museum. At the end of the 1980s they moved to Fitzroy in inner-city Melbourne.
From 1985 to 1995, he presented the weekly ‘Books and Writing’ program on ABC Radio National. In more recent years he has also written and presented radio series on Australian public intellectuals and great travellers in history, as well as regular programs on language.
Besides, Robert Dessaix was a full-time writer since 1995. His first book was his autobiography, A Mother's Disgrace, which was published in 1994 by HarperCollins. Manuscripts concerning A Mother's Disgrace are in the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales. The manuscript was written in French, and the book concerns his journey to alternative sexuality after twelve years of marriage and his meeting with his birth mother Yvonne. It was made into a screenplay by Ross Wilson in 1999.
His first fictional work, the epistolary novel Night Letters, was published in 1996. It was translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, and Portuguese.
His second novel was Corfu, published in 2001.
Dessaix's latest long work, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev defies genre characterization, interweaving a personal travelogue with a biography of Ivan Turgenev. It was published in 2004. It takes inspiration from his doctoral thesis on Turgenev and the Soviet Union, as well as Alain de Botton's works on travel, art and philosophy.
Robert Dessaix now lives in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
Robert Dessaix was shortlisted for Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction and for Book of the Year award, both in 1996, both for "Night Letters". The same year he won the Booksellers Choice Award, also for "Night Letters".
In 1997 Dessaix won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. A year later he received Colin Roderick Award for "And So Forth".
Moreover, in 2005 Robert Dessaix received the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction for "Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev".
In 2007 he became the winner of Margaret Scott Prize also for "Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev".
(In this touching memoir, Robert Dessaix recounts the stor...)
1994(A series of letters written by a seriously ill man, stric...)
1996(Robert Dessaix shows, in this wonderfully thoughtful and ...)
2017(In this landmark collection of Australian writing spannin...)
1993(One Easter a young actor, far from home, rents a house fr...)
2001(Together with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev was ...)
2004(One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, Ro...)
2017(As I Was Saying is a swirling conversation with the reade...)
2012(A book based on the highly regarded Australian Radio Nati...)
1998
