Christopher Koch

For the film and television director, see Chris Koch.

Christopher John Koch, AO, Australian novelist, was born in Hobart in 1932. He has twice won the Miles Franklin Award. In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for contribution to Australian literature.

His novel The Year of Living Dangerously, set in Jakarta during the fall of the Sukarno regime, was made into a film directed by Peter Weir and starring Sigourney Weaver, Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt. The book was loosely inspired by his brother's (Philip Koch) experience as an Australian journalist in Indonesia during that period. His son, Gareth Koch, is a classical guitarist.

Awards

Miles Franklin Award	The Doubleman, winner 1985
	Highways to a War, winner 1996
	The Memory Room, longlisted 2008
The Age Book of the Year Award	The Year of Living Dangerously, 1978 Imaginative Writing Prize winner; 1978 Book of the Year, joint winner
National Book Council Award for Australian Literature	The Year of Living Dangerously, 1979
Colin Roderick Award	Out of Ireland, 1999
Victorian Premier's Literary Award	Out of Ireland, 2000

Books

• The Boys in the Island (1958, revised ed, Angus & Robertson, 1974)
• Across the Sea Wall (Heinemann, 1965)
• The Year of Living Dangerously (Nelson, 1978)
• The Doubleman (Chatto and Windus, 1985)
• Crossing the Gap: a novelist’s essays (Hogarth Press, 1993)
• Highways to a War (Heinemann, 1995)
• Out of Ireland (Doubleday, 1999)
• The Memory Room (2007)
• Lost Voices (2012)

Further reading

Noel Henricksen, Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and his books (Educare, 2003).

External links

• Christopher Koch at Random House Australia
• Podcast of Christopher Koch discussing “Crossing the Gap: Asia and the Australian Imagination” at the Shanghai International Literary Festival