Clive Barry (2 September 1922 – 25 August 2003) was an Australian author, playwright, cartoonist and escaped prisoner of war.[1][2][3] His offbeat, vividly stylised prose—characterised by deadpan wit, surreal violence and a macabre playfulness—gave him brief cult status in the 1960s.[4][5]
He won the first ever Guardian Fiction Prize for Crumb Borne[6][7]—a unique, spasmodically weird prisoner-of-war novella—likened to "swifter more sharply visual Beckett;" the literary equivalent of an expressionist cartoon laced with the strange, visceral humour of early Nabokov.[8][9]
Wilfully elusive, Barry declined to even attend his own prize ceremony, remaining in Africa—the setting for his two other books: The Spear Grinner and Fly Jamskoni. He regarded his infatuation with the Mother Continent as "a suitable reward for a dissolute life."[10]
Aged just seventeen[11]—but with his birth date falsified to meet the minimum enlistment age of twenty[12]—Barry joined the 2/13th Battalion to fight in World War II.[13] He became one of The Rats of Tobruk,[14] going missing in action during the famous siege, and subsequently being imprisoned by, whom he considered, the "emotional, and often brutal" Italians in campo 106.[15] He escaped two years later, slipping past his [by now] demoralised captors to traverse an eight-foot square barbed wire apron under desultory gunfire, then traipsed for four hundred miles over the Alps, malnourished; surviving on grapes and, infrequently, milk donated by peasants. He was shot in the shoulder on the French border, fled to a nunnery to have the wound tended to, then finally crossed into Switzerland for bullet extraction and skiing.[16][17][18]
Decades later, his escapology as a prisoner-of-war would re-emerge—warped absurdly—in the plot of Crumb Borne.[19]
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