Ralph de Boissière
Australian novelist of Trinidadian origin (1907–2008)
Ralph Anthony Charles de Boissière (6 October 1907 – 16 February 2008) was a Trinidad-born social realist novelist, who in 1948 settled in Melbourne, Australia. Described as "an outspoken opponent of racism, injustice, greed and corruption, a passionate humanist with a vision of a just society", de Boissière was the author of four novels although he was most acclaimed for the first two: Crown Jewel and Rum and Coca-Cola, both originally published in the 1950s. A fifth novel, titled Homeless in Paradise, remains unpublished.
Biography
Ralph de Boissière was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the son of Armand de Boissière, a solicitor, and Maude Harper, an Englishwoman who died three weeks later. He attended Queen's Royal College and during this time discovered the Russian authors, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol, who were to remain a lasting influence:
They wrote of a vast country in which the weight of tsarism was destroying millions.... crying out against an entire system in which the guilt of the rulers was being ignored while millions were dying from neglect.... The writers of that time are still my favourites.... A hundred and fifty years later the crimes against mankind have multiplied and are choking us all. But not many today write with that call to humankind, that call which, though muffled by the censor, could still boom out its message.
Initially, de Boissière wished to become a concert pianist; however, on leaving school, he took a job as a salesman, which enlightened him to the living and working conditions of ordinary Trinidadians.
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