(1935-2010) Australian writer, in England from 1966, whose novels tend to embed deeply alienated protagonists into venues – some remote, some distressingly intimate for Australians, as in Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (1967) – which are described with anthropological precision, resulting in tales, whether non-genre or sf/fantasy, that verge constantly upon fable. In Tourmaline (1963 UK) the venue is a decaying town in backwoods Australia and the time the NEAR FUTURE; the narrative is loaded with echoes of myth and forebodings of a further worsening of the POST-HOLOCAUST world. The five protagonists of Visitants (1979), set in Papua, supply a mosaic of responses to a FIRST CONTACT experience in a manner that remotely prefigures the strategies underlying Karen Joy FOWLER's Sarah Canary (1991). The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) is a strikingly intense fantasy. Stow's silence as a writer after 1984 obscured his central importance as an Australian visionary. [JC]
born Geraldton, Western Australia; 28 November 1935
died Harwich, Essex: 30 May 2010