We would like to dedicate this issue of Life Writing to David Heywood Parker (1943–2015).
David taught a generation of life-writing scholars, first as a Reader in English at the Australian National University, Canberra, from 1974 to 1999, and then as Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, from 2000 to 2009.
He was one of the early organisers of the International Auto/Biography Association, the gracious host in Hong Kong for the Fourth IABA international conference in 2004, and the editor of the resulting special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, ‘Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/Biography in an (Anti-)Global Age'.
He was also a writer of novels, memoirs, criticism, and theory. His important volumes on literature and life writing included Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge 1994), The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (Cornell 2007), a number of influential edited collections, and many important essays on autobiography and ethics, with a special emphasis on the work of Charles Taylor.
David was delightful company—generous, modest, and warm. In the acknowledgments to The Self in Moral Space, he thanks literally dozens of students and colleagues in Australia, Hong Kong, and in the IABA.
His many friends in the life writing community will join with us in mourning his passing.