Randolph Stow

In March 2019, La Mama Courthouse Theatre in Melbourne, Australia adapted The Girl Green as Elderflower into a musical. It was adapted by Richard Davies and directed and orchestrated by Sara Grenfell.

Stow died in England on 29 May 2010 of a pulmonary embolism, having been diagnosed with liver cancer.

From 1969 to 1981 he lived at East Bergholt in Suffolk in England, his ancestral county, and he used traditional tales from that area to inform his novel The Girl Green as Elderflower. The last decades of his life he spent in nearby Harwich, the setting for his final novel The Suburbs of Hell. He last visited Australia in 1974.

The Girl Green as Elderflower is often considered to be closely linked to Stow's life. After dealing with a bout of malaria in Papua New Guinea, he moved to East Bergholt in Suffolk in England from 1969 to 1981, his ancestral county, and he used traditional tales from that area, many of which he translated from Latin himself, to inform his novel. The regional stories Stow used for the novel were collected by William of Newburgh, Gervase of Tilbury, Gerald the Welshman, Ralph Coggeshall, Roger Howden, and Walter Map. Many of the characters in the novel are based on Stow's friends. He conducted research in advance of publication for several years. In 1978, he and John Constable's great-great-grandson were in a serious car accident, which finally spurred Stow to begin writing the novel. On New Year's Day 1979, he began writing and finished thirty-two days later.

Stow first visited England in 1960 and lived there for a few years, although he returned several times to Australia. Tourmaline, his fourth novel, was completed in 1962 while he taught in Leeds. In 1964 and 1965 he travelled in North America on a Harkness Fellowship, including a sojourn in Aztec, New Mexico, during which he wrote one of his best known novels, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea. While living in Perth (WA) in 1966 he wrote his popular children's book Midnite.

His novel To the Islands won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. He was awarded the Patrick White Award in 1979. As well as producing fiction, poetry, and numerous book reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, he also wrote libretti for musical theatre works by Peter Maxwell Davies.

Julian Randolph Stow (28 November 1935 – 29 May 2010) was an Australian-born writer, novelist and poet.

Julian Randolph Stow's paternal grandfather was Francis Leslie Stow, a Crown Solicitor of Western Australia. Stow's great-grandfather was Randolph Isham Stow, a judge on the Supreme Court of South Australia and Attorney General of South Australia; a great-great-uncle, Jefferson Stow was prominent as an explorer of northern Australia, and Stow's great-great-grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Quinton Stow, was a pioneering Congregational minister in South Australia. The Stow family was from Suffolk, where they had owned land for several generations before Thomas Stow was appointed the colonial missionary to South Australia by the London Colonial Missionary Society in 1836. In 1837, they relocated to South Australia. After Thomas Stow's death, the Stow Memorial Church was constructed in his honor. His wife, Elizabeth Randolph Eppes, was American and her mother was Thomas Jefferson's first cousin. The Stow lineage can be traced back to the Plantagenets and William the Conqueror.

Stow's mother's family settled in Australia in the 1830s and were some of the earliest to arrive. His great-grandfather, George Sewell, arrived in Australia in 1835; soon after, the rest of his family relocated from Essex to Australia. Sewell eventually moved from Perth to Geraldton, where his descendants remained. Stow grew up very interested in the traditional stories and histories of the region.