David Foster

David Manning Foster is an Australian novelist and scientist. He has written a range of satires on the theme of the decline of Western civilization and produced short stories, poetry, essays, and several radio plays. He spent his early years in Katoomba, raised by his mother and maternal grandparents. In 1950, Foster spent six months in Katoomba Hospital recovering from poliomyelitis, a disease that left him with a slight limp. His mother married a bank officer, and Foster attended high schools in Sydney (Fort Street High School), Armidale (Armidale High School), and Orange (Orange High School) as the family moved from city to country towns. At Orange High, Foster began playing drums professionally in a jazz dance band. In 1961, Foster commenced Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney in Sydney, but he left studies after a year to work and travel. A year later, in 1963, he returned to the university to study chemistry at the University of Sydney School of Chemistry. Foster worked part-time as a musician and as an engineer at Marrickville Council while he completed his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. He was awarded the University Medal for Inorganic Chemistry in 1967 and moved to Canberra for a PhD in Biological Inorganic Chemistry at the Australian National University, from which he graduated in 1970. At the end of this degree, he went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States, to pursue postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Pennsylvania. He began to write his first novellas, later published in North South West (1973). Back in Sydney in 1972, he worked as a research officer in the Department of Medicine at the University of Sydney before abandoning science for a career as a novelist. Since then, he has supported himself and his family through various jobs as a pool attendant, musician, postman, truck driver, martial arts instructor, and trawler fisherman. After the publication of North, South, West by Macmillan, Foster was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship.