An Imaginary Life

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Advanced and English Standard 11-12 (2024) syllabuses (focus area: Texts and human experiences). The NESA edition is Random House UK, 1999, although the novel was first published in 1978. It is not on the 2019 to 2026 list that the 2026 HSC uses (Malouf's only entry then was the poetry collection Earth Hour), so it is new. Sitting the 2026 HSC? See the 2019 to 2026 text list.

Why this text suits Texts and human experiences

David Malouf's 1978 novel imagines the exile of the Roman poet Ovid to Tomis, a remote settlement on the Black Sea, in the early years of the first century. It is the story of a cultured, sophisticated man stripped of the city, the audience and the language that defined him, and of what he becomes in their absence. That arc, from isolation through an unexpected relationship to a profound change of self, represents a wide range of human experiences: loss, loneliness, learning, fear of death and the possibility of belonging.

Because Malouf frames it as an act of imagination, the novel also lets you argue about how stories construct and extend human experience, which is a productive angle for this focus area.

Voice and narrative form

The novel is narrated in the first person by Ovid. Its voice is reflective and intimate, often addressed to the reader as if the act of writing were itself a way of staying alive. Notice how the narration changes. Early on it is the voice of a man measuring his new surroundings against Rome and finding them lacking. As the story advances the language loosens and becomes more attentive to weather, light, the body and the land.

When you analyse voice, trace that change. The shift in how Ovid describes the world is the clearest evidence of the shift in who he is. A paragraph that tracks one such moment of change in diction or perception is stronger than a general claim that "Ovid changes".

Exile and displacement

Exile is the novel's starting condition. Ovid's sense of himself is tied to Latin, to the city, to his reputation as a poet. In Tomis, language, custom and landscape are all unfamiliar and, to him, harsh. Malouf uses the settlement's bare, cold setting to make loss physical, so that Ovid's grief is registered through the land as much as through his thoughts. A thoughtful essay will argue that the novel represents exile as both a wound and an opening, and will show the technique (setting, imagery, shifts in tone) that carries each side.

The child and the limits of language

The encounter with the wild child is the heart of the book, and where language becomes the central subject. Ovid, a master of words, meets someone who has none. His attempts to teach the child to speak become a study in what language gives and what it costs. Be exact here. Argue that the relationship is reciprocal: the child learns, but Ovid is also taught, about trust, patience, the body and a way of knowing that is not made of words. Show how the novel stages this by placing Ovid's careful, often tender actions against the child's responses and silences.

Avoid reducing the child to a symbol. The text works because the relationship is rendered as a physical, daily care, and it is that concreteness that gives the symbolic reading its force.

Transformation and mortality

Ovid's Metamorphoses is a poem about change, and the novel carries that idea into Ovid's own life. The closing movement of the book treats death and transformation together, and the landscape is increasingly woven into how Ovid understands himself. For essay purposes, treat the ending as the culmination of a pattern: the loosening of the self from its Roman identity, the deepening bond with the child, and the movement from individual isolation towards a wider sense of belonging in the natural world. This is also where the focus area's interest in individual and collective experience becomes concrete: one man's private change opens onto something larger than the individual.

Context as a driver of argument

The setting is ancient Rome and its frontier, but the book is an Australian novel of the late 1970s, and its concerns with place, language and the relationship between a transplanted culture and an unfamiliar land resonate with that context. Use this as a driver of argument rather than a backdrop: the novel's treatment of a civilised outsider learning from a place he first despises can be argued as a reflection on how people make a home in a landscape that does not obviously welcome them. Make the link through the text's own representations, not through claims about the author's intentions.

Common pitfalls

• Plot summary or a history lesson on Ovid. The marker wants an argument about representation.
• Treating the child as a single-meaning symbol. Keep to the relationship as the text builds it.
• Quoting the author's life in place of analysing technique.
• Vague talk about "nature". Name the specific images, shifts in diction or structural moves that carry the idea.
• Forgetting the focus area. Always return to what the text shows about human experience and the emotions tied to it.

Essay scaffold

Introduction. State a thesis about how the novel represents transformation through exile, naming the concept from the focus area you are using. Mention the first person voice as the technique that makes the change visible.

Body 1. Exile and loss: how setting and Ovid's early voice represent displacement and the fear of insignificance.

Body 2. Language and relationship: how the work of teaching the child turns the novel from a story of loss to a story of connection.

Body 3. Transformation and mortality: how the closing movement draws individual change and the natural world together.

Conclusion. Argue that Ovid's change is a change in how he speaks and what he can bear to hear: exile strips his old Roman self, the work of teaching the child gives him a new language, and his death returns him to the landscape. Say whether the novel finally treats that remaking as gain or loss.

Read the text

An Imaginary Life is in copyright. Borrow it from your school or local library, or buy it from a bookseller. The edition NESA prescribes is Random House UK, 1999 (ISBN 9780099273844). The novel itself was first published in 1978. Use the NESA edition: exam questions quote it, and a school may substitute another only if it is out of print or widely unavailable.

The NESA details on this page were checked against its published HSC English prescriptions and the English Advanced Year 12 Texts and human experiences page on 7 October 2026.