About The Author
Larry Buttrose is an Australian writer living in Sydney. He is the author of 18 books including fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He is also a playwright, screenwriter and journalist.
Larry was born in Adelaide and grew up in public housing in the city’s western suburbs. He did a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Adelaide – becoming the first Buttrose to hold a degree. He later returned there to do his PhD. He trained as a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Commission (now Corporation) but left at the age of 23 to pursue a career as a writer. That year he travelled to Spain to meet the English poet Robert Graves, requesting and receiving his “Poet’s Blessing”.
He began writing poetry in his teens, and at the age of 17 co-founded a poetry magazine with friends Stephen Measday and Donna Maegraith. Larry wrote his first novel Something About Blue at the age of 22 by which time he was publishing his poetry broadly in magazines, journals and newspapers in Australia as well as internationally. He published two chapbooks of poetry in his mid twenties, but his first book was the poetry collection The Leichhardt Heater Journey (1980) followed by another poetry collection Learning Italian in 1986.
Larry moved to Sydney in 1982, having also lived in Bath and London and travelled in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas and next came a book of literary travel writing The King Neptune Day & Night Club (Angus and Robertson, 1992), another book of travel writing Café Royale (HarperCollins 1997), and his first novel The Maze of the Muse (HarperCollins 1998).
At the same time Larry was writing plays and screenplays, starting with the stage play Pallas (produced at WAAPA IN Perth in 1987, and in the same year at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney). His critically-acclaimed adaption of Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness was produced at Crossroads Theatre in Sydney in 1991. At the same time a feature-length documentary he wrote in 1988, Movietone Memories, was followed by the film comedy feature Gino, co-written with comedian Vince Sorrenti. In 1992 Larry co-wrote his most successful stage work with Kathryn Riding… the tap dancing musical Hot Shoe Shuffle. A sell out national tour was followed by seasons in the West End and in the United States, and the musical has often been revived since.
In 2000 Lonely Planet Destinations published The Blue Man, a reworking of his second travel book Café Royale, and in 2001 Simon&Schuster published his second novel Sweet Sentence. Larry was living in Byron Bay at the time, but in late 2006 bought a house in Leura in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, and there wrote a string of nonfiction books for New Holland publishers. These include Tales of the Popes, and Dead Famous: Deaths of the Famous and Famous Deaths, as well as the satirical graphic novel, Finding the Shelf Within (written as “Jane Smith”) in 2009.
Next Larry developed a new stage adaptation of Don Quixote with Bell Shakespeare with funding from the Spanish Ministry of Culture. The play was produced at the Pavilion Theatre in Sydney in 2013.
in 2012 Larry travelled to India and there wrote the ghosted Saroo Briefly memoir A Long Way Home (Penguin 2013). It became an international bestseller, and three years later the screen version Lion became an acclaimed global hit.
In 2017 Larry published his Selected Poems with BryshaWilson Press, and in 2018 the same house published a reworked version of his first novel The Maze of the Muse. In 2022 Larry began working on a book of short stories about the forthcoming human colonisation of Mars, Everyone on Mars, published by Puncher & Wattmann in August 2024.
In mid 2024 Larry returned to live in inner Sydney.
