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Roger McDonald (born 23 June 1941, at Young, New South Wales, Australia) is the author of seven novels, two works of non-fiction, and a number of other works.

The middle son of a Presbyterian minister, Hugh Fraser McDonald, and a historian, Dr Lorna McDonald, his childhood was spent in the NSW country towns of Bribbaree, Temora, and Bourke, before the family moved to Sydney. He attended The Scots College and the University of Sydney.

He was briefly a teacher, ABC producer, and publisher's editor in NSW, Tasmania, and Queensland, before moving to Canberra and taking up writing full-time in 1976, in order to complete his first novel, 1915. Since 1980 he has lived near Braidwood, NSW, apart from periods in Sydney and New Zealand.

His novels are 1915, Slipstream, Rough Wallaby, Water Man, The Slap, Mr Darwin's Shooter, The Ballad of Desmond Kale. Non-fiction: Shearers' Motel and The Tree In Changing Light.

1915 won The Age Book of the Year in 1979 and the South Australian Biennial Literature Prize in 1980. In 1982 it was made into a seven-part ABC-TV television series. (Scripting: Peter Yeldham)

Shearers' Motel won the 1993 Banjo National Book Council Banjo Award for non-fiction. It was filmed as "Cross Turning Over" for ABC-TV in 1996 (Director: Robert Klenner)

McDonald was nominated for the Miles Franklin Award in 1994 for Water Man, and in 1999 for Mr Darwin's Shooter, which in that year won the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, the South Australian Premier's Awards, and the Adelaide Festival Book of the Year.

The Ballad of Desmond Kale won the Miles Franklin award in 2006 and the Adelaide Festival Prize for Fiction in 2008. McDonald won the O.Henry Prize in 2008 for "The Bullock Run" (story).

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roger McDonald", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0