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Preparing for bed on Thursday night, I glanced at my phone. There were messages from Greece, Italy, from Scotland and South Africa, from friends all mourning the death of David Malouf. The texts expressed grief at his passing, but they all conveyed gratitude for his legacy. David Malouf was and is, and will always be, one of the world’s great writers.

A wonderful teacher gave me his 1975 novel Johnno to read when I was in high school. I still adore that book, for its acute tenderness, for its penetrating exploration of friendship and memory. From the outset, Malouf’s prose was precise, thoughtful. I recognised his fidelity to the beauty of English.

This attentiveness to language is sometimes derided as old-fashioned, as classicist. Malouf was a classicist: two of his masterpieces, An Imaginary Life (1978) and Ransom (2009) are inspired by Ovid and by Homer. There was an unforgiving shrillness to some of the criticisms of Malouf in the 1990s; I recall in the universities and within some literary circles, his work was derided as cold, as closeted. This always struck me as ridiculous. Malouf’s astounding talent was to remain lucid and attentive in his language, yet to imbue his imaginary worlds with a subtle, deeply felt sensuality. I recall the first time I went up to Brisbane in the early 1980s, feeling the moist heat collect at my pits, sniffing the overwhelming scents and thinking, “This smells and feels exactly like Johnno!”

I don’t love all of Malouf’s work. You don’t love everything a great writer or a great artist or a great film-maker creates. If you do, you betray their trust in you as a reader: a great artist demands discernment. I struggled with Remembering Babylon. Parts of it seemed faltering, unconvincing. Yet I admired his wanting to interrogate, to try to understand, the complicated history of colonialism in our country. Another of our great writers, Nam Le, wrote a monograph on Malouf, for Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series. With great sympathy and unflinching exactitude, Le struggles with what is beautiful in this novel and with what is mannered, unresolved.

Malouf wrote the libretto for an opera based on Patrick White’s Voss. That makes sense. White’s novel, as with Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline, is an attempt by a white writer to confront the myths of colonialism and Indigenous dispossession in this country. Of course they fail. Yet they don’t shirk the central importance of trying to make sense of this history, and they are heroic in their attempt to create alternative mythologies. It’s been too long. It is time for me to reread Remembering Babylon.

I am fortunate to have three distinct memories of meeting Malouf. In each encounter he was gracious and considerate. The first time I met him I had brought my parents to a literary launch at the Melbourne writers’ festival. My parents were not of that world, and their limited English made them uncomfortable within it. David took time to speak to them, to be solicitous. My mother made him laugh. I will always be grateful for his kindness.

In Auckland, at another literary festival, an audience member asked him, “What are your favourite novels?” He spoke simply and eloquently of the debt that all writers owe to the 19th-century Russian writers. That led to a wondrous discussion among the panel – writers from Australia, Europe, Africa and Asia – on the central importance of the Russian novel on our art. The man’s wisdom was profound.

The last time I saw him, he was sitting alone in the green room of the Sydney writers’ festival. I felt the same shyness that I had experienced at meeting him all those years ago in Melbourne. The difference now was that I understood something of the tenacity and discipline required to maintain a writing life. I went up to him, and I spoke to him about Ransom. I think it one of the greatest novels ever written; Malouf takes a moment from Homer’s The Iliad and makes it his own. It is an encounter between the Trojan king, Priam, and the Greek warrior, Achilles. Achilles, demented by wrath and grief, is refusing to grant Hector a proper burial. Malouf’s love of the classics is in this novel; the control and meticulousness of his craft is in this novel, as is his deep humanity. It made me smell, sense, be on the bloodied fields of Troy. The novel makes you experience the strangeness of the ancients yet reminds you of the universality of grief and compassion.

David smiled at my words, thanked me, and then quickly deflected the praise. I am so glad I spoke to him. Of how much I loved that book, of how much all of us, as readers and writers, owe him.

I walked out on to our veranda this morning, sniffed the morning air. I whispered, Mr. Malouf, thank you.

• Christos Tsiolkas is the author of 11 books, including The Slap, Barracuda, Loaded, Damascus and, most recently, The In-Between