The Australian author Christopher Koch, best known as the author of The Year of Living Dangerously, has died in Tasmania. He was 81.
Koch died in Hobart on Sunday night with his wife Robin by his side. He had been reportedly diagnosed with cancer about a year ago.
Koch won the Miles Franklin Award twice: in 1985 for The Doubleman, and in 1996 for Highways To A War.
However, he is probably best known for his 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously, set in Indonesia during the breakdown of President Sukarno's rule.
In 1982 it was made into a successful film, directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hunt. Koch co-wrote the screenplay, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Margaret Connolly, Koch's agent for almost 20 years and a close friend, said on Monday he had been "one of Australia's great novelists" and had left "an important body of work".
"He had a great understanding of human nature," she said. "He really understood people well."
She described him as a "novelist of ideas and a great novelist of place". He also had "a beautiful prose style - and he knew how to tell a story".
Koch's first novel, The Boys In The Island, was published in 1958. His final novel, Lost Voices, was published in 2012. It was shortlisted for the fiction section of the Prime Minister's Literary Award.
Koch was born in Hobart in 1932 and educated at the University of Tasmania. As a young man he lived for a time in Britain, and in the early 1960s attended a Stanford University writers' workshop in the United States.
Koch lived in Sydney for many years, working at the ABC as a radio producer.
In recent years he lived in the picturesque Tasmanian town of Richmond.
The Year Of Living Dangerously was loosely inspired by the experiences of Koch's younger brother Philip as a journalist in Indonesia. It won The Age Book of the Year award in 1978.
"I've written other books since that I think might be better," Koch told The Australian in September 2012.
"But people always come back to that one and it's because it was a film. That's how much film dominates our culture."
