Australian novelist, essayist and journalist
Robert Dessaix, also known as Robert Jones, is an Australian novelist, essayist and journalist.
Early life and education
Robert Dessaix was born in Sydney, and adopted at an early age by Tom and Jean Jones, after which he was known as Robert Jones. Tom Jones, a merchant seaman, was already 55 when Robert was adopted.[citation needed]
Dessaix was educated at North Sydney Boys High School and the Australian National University (ANU). He studied at Moscow State University during the early 1970s.[citation needed]
Career
Dessaux taught Russian studies at ANU and the University of New South Wales from 1972 to 1984. During this time he translated a number of Russian books into English in collaboration with Michael Ulman, including The Sheepskin Coat and An Absolutely Happy Village by Boris Vakhtin.[citation needed]
Robert Jones resumed his birth name Robert Dessaix after he was awarded his doctorate.[citation needed]
From 1985 to 1995 he presented the ABC program Books and Writing.
His first book was his autobiography, A Mother's Disgrace, which was published in 1994 by HarperCollins. The manuscript was written in French, and the book concerns his journey to an alternative sexuality after twelve years of marriage and his meeting with his birth mother Yvonne. It was made into a screenplay by Ross Wilson in 1999. He never met his birth father, who was killed in an air crash shortly after the end of World War II.[citation needed]
His first fictional work, the epistolary novel Night Letters, was published in 1996. It was translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, and Portuguese.[citation needed]
His second novel was Corfu, published in 2001.[citation needed]
Dessaix's long work, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev, published in 2004, defies genre characterisation, interweaving a personal travelogue with a biography of Ivan Turgenev. It takes inspiration from his doctoral thesis on Turgenev and the Soviet Union, as well as Alain de Botton's works on travel, art and philosophy.[citation needed]
In March 2010 it was revealed that Dessaix had been refused a visa to attend the Shanghai International Literary Festival. He had declared his HIV-positive status on his application, and although the guidelines stated that HIV status would have no prejudicial effect, it was felt that it must have been the reason for the refusal because Dessaix had had no political involvement in matters concerning China.[1]
Appearances
Robert Dessaix was on the program to appear in an event at the 2017 Brisbane Writers Festival in Brisbane, Queensland.[2]
Dessaix's "The Pleasures of Leisure" appeared in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate English Examination on 18 October 2018. In the form of an edited nonfiction extract, it served as the last of three "unseen" texts in Section I of the first paper.[citation needed]
SLNSW holdings
Manuscripts concerning A Mother's Disgrace are in the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales, along with Night Letters.[3][4]
