Admirers pay tribute to writer best known for the Edith trilogy after death in Sydney hospital
, the second book in the trilogy, won the prize in 2001, while Cold Light was shortlisted for it in 2012.
At 21 he married his childhood sweetheart, Wendy Holloway, who would later become a literary editor in London after the marriage disintegrated. Moorhouse went into journalism and became involved in activism and trade unions. Moorhouse wrote prolifically and with irreverence and humour of his passions – food, drink, travel, sex and gender. Early in his fiction, and later in his 2005 memoir, Martini, he wrote frankly about his own bisexuality and androgyny. In his writing, he said, he wanted to explore “the idea of intimacy without family – now that procreation is not the only thing that gives sex meaning”.
“When someone of his calibre dies, it feels like he belongs to the public,” she said. “I was a great fan ever since I was a teenager, but we met in the 90s and began discussing the biography in the early 2000s.”