Patrick White. (London, 1912 - Sydney, 1990) Australian writer who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature. Patrick White belonged to a herding family that had been established in Australia for many generations. He entered Kings College, Cambridge to study history, but decided to pursue modern languages, so he made frequent trips to France and Germany; In addition to French and German writers, he was especially captivated by August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen from European literature. After several years in which he wrote poetry and short stories for newspapers in England, in 1939, during a long trip to the United States, he wrote his first novel, Happy Valley, published in 1941.