September 9, 2026 — 11:25amBlanche d’Alpuget, the acclaimed Australian author, journalist and widow of the late prime minister Bob Hawke, has died aged 82.Her family announced her death on Wednesday morning, saying she died on September 8 following complications from influenza.Journalist and author Blanche d’Alpuget has died aged 82. Jessica Hromas“Blanche wrote and lived entirely on her own terms,” her family said. “She was full of vitality, generosity and curiosity, with an extraordinary appetite for beauty, ideas, history, new places and spirited conversation. She refused to be confined by convention or by other people’s expectations of who she should be.”D’Alpuget left a final message to be shared after her death: “Our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another.”Prime Minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute to d’Alpuget as a singular figure in Australian life and letters. He praised the “verve and originality” of her novels and her “definitive” biographies, most famously those of Hawke, “who became her great love and ultimately her husband”.“With the passing of Blanche d’Alpuget overnight, Australia has lost a true one-off,” Albanese said.Among those mourning d’Alpuget was lifelong friend Sue Kirby, who met her as an eight-year-old at SCEGGS Darlinghurst. Kirby’s father, judge Sir Richard Kirby, later became the subject of d’Alpuget’s first biography.More than seven decades later, they were still texting daily before d’Alpuget’s death, sometimes just an emoji or “G’day Blanco”, Kirby’s affectionate name for her. Kirby said d’Alpuget spent 10 days in intensive care at St Vincent’s Hospital after a chest infection. Until then, she had been fit and healthy, and the pair had cruised together last year.“What a woman. It’s hard to sum her up. She was interested in everything. She was a great companion. She had a wicked sense of humour. She was just terrific fun to be with,” Kirby said.Over a career of more than six decades, d’Alpuget wrote novels, political biographies, essays and historical fiction, collecting numerous literary awards along the way.She became a prominent figure in Australian letters with books including her first novel Monkeys in the Dark (1980) and Turtle Beach (1981), both of which drew on her time in South-East Asia.Her 1982 bestseller Robert J. Hawke: A Biography established d’Alpuget as a major political biographer and won a NSW Premier’s Award. She returned to Hawke as a subject decades later in Hawke: The Prime Minister and Bob Hawke: The Complete Biography.D’Alpuget first met Hawke at a party in Jakarta in 1970, when she was 26 and married to diplomat Tony Pratt. They became lovers six years later, beginning a relationship that continued, with long periods apart, for almost two decades before they married in 1995.Hawke proposed in 1978 but withdrew the offer as his political ambitions grew. “He was a politician first and foremost, and I was a writer first and foremost,” d’Alpuget told Good Weekend in 2019.After they separated, d’Alpuget wrote Robert J. Hawke: A Biography, five months before Hawke became prime minister.Professor Chris Wallace, a political historian at the University of Canberra, described Robert J. Hawke: A Biography as “arguably the best political biography ever written in Australia”. It was d’Alpuget’s second biography, after her 1977 book Mediator: A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby.Wallace said d’Alpuget’s psycho-biographical approach pushed Hawke to confront difficult aspects of his childhood and upbringing during their interviews for the biography – a process she believes helped prepare him for the prime ministership.“It’s not as though she went easy on him – she didn’t. She forced him to confront really uncomfortable truths about his upbringing and history and deal with them,” Wallace said.“She put Bob through a pretty torrid psychological process and he was the better for it. And it gave Australian politics a brilliant take on a troubled and difficult person who went on to become a very effective prime minister.”They rekindled their relationship in the late 1980s. In 1993, d’Alpuget survived a light-plane crash off far north Queensland, an episode she later said changed Hawke’s thinking about their future. After his marriage to Hazel ended in 1994 after 38 years, Hawke and d’Alpuget married in 1995 and remained together until he died in 2019.Childhood friend Sue Kirby said d’Alpuget’s relationship with Hawke had for years overshadowed how she was seen, recalling a period when she was regarded as “the most hated woman in Australia”.“I used to try and stick up for her. I told people there was more to her than just that,” Kirby said. “Everyone thought she was a bimbo, but she wasn’t. She was a bright, intelligent woman. She and Bob were deeply in love.”“When we were together, I just felt very contented,” d’Alpuget told Good Weekend after Hawke’s death. “A sense that something had clicked together, two parts of a thing had just clicked.”Her family described their almost 24-year marriage as “a great love”.Author Thomas Keneally, who knew d’Alpuget for decades, said she was one of the brilliant novelists of her generation and was lively, unpretentious and deeply spiritual.“I knew her before she was married to Bob Hawke and she elevated Hawkie by being so literary,” Keneally said. “She read the literary pages while Hawkie read the racing pages. She liked good writing and she was at the same time a very good writer for her era.”Keneally said d’Alpuget’s beauty sometimes overshadowed the seriousness of her work.“She was always a genuine woman. An unpretentious woman. Because of her great beauty, I don’t think Australia quite understood her. They wrote her off as something other than she was.”Born in Sydney on January 3, 1944, d’Alpuget started in newspapers, with jobs at The Daily Mirror and Woman’s Day before working for the News of the World in London.Her first marriage was to Pratt, with whom she had her only son, Louis. The couple spent periods living and travelling overseas, including in Indonesia and Malaysia, which provided material for d’Alpuget’s early writing.Blanche d’Alpuget ahead of the adaptation of her novel Turtle Beach in 1982.Fairfax ArchivesAfter stepping away from publishing for nearly 15 years, d’Alpuget returned to books with her short personal essay about love and creativity, On Longing, in 2008. She later embarked on an ambitious five-volume series of historical novels set in the Plantagenet era that were released between 2013 and 2020.Jane Curry, d’Alpuget’s publisher at Ventura Press, which published three books in the series, said writing fiction was the passion of her life.“She was so full of life, stylish, passionate, fiercely intelligent and inspiring,” Curry said. “She inspired me with her passion for her life – she absolutely put us all in the shade.”She remained adventurous in her later years. At the age of 80, d’Alpuget travelled to Raja Ampat in Indonesia, where she swam with whale sharks. “Her appetite for life never left her,” her family said.Her final novel, murder mystery The Bunny Club, appeared when she was 81.“The inspiration for that came from the inspiration shop – my head,” d’Alpuget said in 2025. “And I loved writing it. I’d never written crime fiction before, and that was another thing I wanted, the challenge of a new genre, and crime is completely different from writing a regular novel.”D’Alpuget is survived by her son, artist and sculptor Louis Pratt, daughter-in-law Brianna and granddaughter Sienna. She was also close to Hawke’s children, Sue Pieters-Hawke, Rosslyn Dillon and Stephen Hawke, and their families.“We will miss her force, her humour, her curiosity and her love beyond measure,” her family said.Get the day’s breaking news, entertainment ideas and a long read to enjoy. Sign up to receive our Evening Edition newsletter.From our partners