Frank Thomas Moorhouse AM (21 December 1938 – 26 June 2022) was an Australian writer who won major national prizes for the short story, the novel, the essay and for script writing.

Moorhouse is best known for having won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel Dark Palace[2] which, together with Grand Days and Cold Light, forms the "Edith Trilogy"—a fictional account of the League of Nations—which traces the strange, convoluted life of a young woman who enters the world of diplomacy in the 1920s and becomes involved in the newly formed International Atomic Energy Agency after World War II.

His mother was a direct descendant of John Boden Yeates (1807-1861), a British convict transported to Australia in 1837.

After leaving school, Moorhouse began his career as a copy boy and then trained as a cadet journalist on the Daily Telegraph (1955–1957).

The author of 18 books, Moorhouse became a full-time fiction writer during the 1970s, also writing essays, short stories, journalism and film, radio, and TV scripts.

He lived for many years in Balmain where, together with Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Robert Hughes, he associated with the Sydney Push—an anarchistic movement that championed freedom of speech and sexual liberation.

In 1975 he played a fundamental role in the evolution of copyright law in Australia in the case University of New South Wales v Moorhouse.

He was active in the defence of freedom of expression and in analysis of the issues affecting it and in the 1970s was arrested and prosecuted on a couple of occasions while campaigning against censorship.

[citation needed] Moorhouse married his high-school girlfriend Wendy Halloway in 1959, but they separated four years later, having no children.

Thereafter he led a sometimes turbulent bisexual life shaped by his own androgyny, some of which is chronicled in his book Martini: A Memoir (Random House 2005).

During the researching and writing of his League of Nations novels—the 'Edith Trilogy' (1989–2011)—he lived in Besançon, France (close to Geneva), Washington D.C., Cambridge, and Canberra.

[13] The book includes love letters written by Moorhouse's ex-wife, the journalist Wendy James, to him during her time as a student in Nowra.