Madeleine St John

Madeleine St John (12 November 194118 June 2006) was an Australian writer, the first Australian woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction (in 1997 for her novel The Essence of the Thing).

Biography St John was born in 1941 in Castlecrag, a suburb of Sydney, and schooled at Queenwood School for Girls, Mosman. She was born to Edward St John, a Queen's Counsel, the son of a Church of England clergyman.

She went the University of Sydney to study arts where she was a contemporary of Bruce Beresford, John Bell, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Arthur Dignam, Robert Hughes

She married Christopher Tillam, a filmmaker, with whom she moved to San Francisco to live while he studied film. She died aged 64 at St Mary's Hospital, London, of emphysema and was cremated at Kensal Green Cemetery.

A biography Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John, written by Helen Trinca, was published by Text Publishing in 2013.

Writing career She wrote four novels. The first one, The Women in Black, published in 1993 and re-released in 2009, is a comedy of manners set in a department store in her native Sydney during the 1950s and the only one of her novels to be set in Australia. It was adapted into the 2015 musical Ladies in Black by Tim Finn and Carolyn Burns. Under Australian director, Bruce Beresford the book has been made into a film, Ladies in Black, released in Australia September 2018. In 2018 the book was republished as Ladies in Black. In 2024 the TV series Ladies in Black premiered in Australia. Her other three are a kind of trilogy based in London's Notting Hill, where she lived. The Essence of the Thing (1997) was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. She was working on a new novel when she died.

Beresford writes that "a major strength of her writing was the accumulation of minutiae". He says that "she was so furious over some minor point in a French translation of one of her novels that she refused to allow it to appear. Kamikaze-like, she stipulated in her will that there were to be no translations of her novels into any language".

Works The Women in Black (1993) A Pure Clear Light (1996) The Essence of the Thing (1997) A Stairway to Paradise (1999)