David Foster was born in 1944 and spent his early childhood in the Blue Mountains of NSW. He trained as a scientist at Sydney University and the ANU and spent 1970 in the United States as a Fellow of the National Institutes of Health, and 1978 in Europe as a recipient of the Marten Bequest for Prose. His novel The Pure Landshared won the first Age award for the best Australian book of the year, and his novel Moonlite won the National Book Council Award for Australian Literature. His novel The Glade Within the Grove won the 1997 Miles Franklin Literary Award.