James Cowan
James Cowan is author of a number of internationally acclaimed books, including "A Troubadour’s Testament" and "Letters from A Wild State". In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal for his novel, "A Mapmaker’s Dream". His work has been translated into seventeen languages.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1942, Cowan attended school in Europe and then, in the 1960’s traveled and worked in Vancouver, New York, and London. Returning to Australia in 1973 he took this opportunity of viewing his homeland as if it were a foreign country. He traveled throughout Australia exploring early European culture and its imprint on the land. This led to a succession of books, namely "The Mountain Men", "The River People", and "Starlight’s Trail".
Cowan then began a ten-year study of the Aboriginal culture which led him to work, study and finally live among Aborigines in the Center, the Far North and the Kimberly region of Australia. This resulted in a series of books that explored Aboriginal themes: "Mysteries of the Dreaming", "Myths of Dreaming", "Letters from a Wild State", "Sacred Places", "The Aboriginal Tradition", and finally "Messengers of the Gods" all found their inspiration in traditional cultural perspectives that Cowan found there.
Beginning in the 1990s, Cowan turned to a more global perspective. He was interested in fashioning a new prose - one that is spare, limpid, and devoid of all the old mechanisms of literary realism. This new prose is exploited in his novels "A Mapmaker’s Dream", "A Troubadour’s Testament", and more recently "Palace of Memory". Each of these novels is an attempt to re-affirm the greatness of the European and Near-Eastern traditions. Though steeped in history and imbued with the continuum between past and present, Cowan’s work is thoroughly directed toward the modern.
More recently, Cowan has just returned to Australia after spending three years in Italy where he researched his latest work "Francis: A Saints Way". His latest work is "Journey to the Inner Mountain", a study of St. Antony of Egypt of the 3rd century is now on sale.
He now lives in Queensland.
From: Inner Explorations
James Cowan has written a new interpretation of Rumi's Divan-E Shams through Vega Books, 2003, and can be purchased through most bookselling outlets
