When Christopher Koch died, The New York Times described him as ‘one of Australia’s finest novelists’. His breakthrough novel was 1978’s The Year of Living Dangerously, set in mid-1960s Indonesia during the fall of the Sukarno regime. The book was made into a film directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. For his role in co-writing the screenplay, Koch was nominated for an Academy Award.
Koch grew up in Hobart. He joined the ABC as a cadet journalist in the 1950s and later worked as a producer for the national broadcaster. Though he lived away from Tasmania for much of his life, the island not only inspired the beginnings of his writing career but remained a touchstone throughout it.
Koch published his first novel, The Boys in the Island in 1958, and his last, Lost Voices, in 2012. He won Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award twice, for The Doubleman in 1985, and Highways to a War in 1995, the same year he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to literature.
