Clive Barry (2 September 1922 – 25 August 2003) was an Australian author, playwright, cartoonist and escaped prisoner of war. His offbeat, vividly stylised proseâÂÂcharacterised by deadpan wit, surreal violence and a macabre playfulnessâÂÂgave him brief cult status in the 1960s.
He won the first ever Guardian Fiction Prize for Crumb BorneâÂÂa unique, spasmodically weird prisoner-of-war novellaâÂÂlikened to "swifter more sharply visual Beckett;" the literary equivalent of an expressionist cartoon laced with the strange, visceral humour of early Nabokov.
Wilfully elusive, Barry declined to even attend his own prize ceremony, remaining in AfricaâÂÂthe 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."
Aged just seventeenâÂÂbut with his birth date falsified to meet the minimum enlistment age of twentyâÂÂBarry joined the 2/13th Battalion to fight in World War II. He became one of The Rats of Tobruk, 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. 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.
Decades later, his escapology as a prisoner-of-war would re-emergeâÂÂwarped absurdlyâÂÂin the plot of Crumb Borne.