Celebrated author and essayist Frank Moorhouse (1938–2022) was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers before becoming a full-time writer in the 1970s. He won national prizes for his fiction, non-fiction, and essays. He is best known for the highly acclaimed Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light, novels which follow the career of an Australian woman in the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s through to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s as she struggled to become a diplomat. His work has been translated into several languages and recognised with awards including The Age Book of the Year and the ASAL Gold Medal for Forty-Seventeen (2007) and the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Dark Palace (2000). He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was made a Doctor of the University by Griffith University in 1997 and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Sydney, 2015.