It’s the birthday of the Roman poet Ovid (b. 43 BCE), who wrote Metamorphoses, and the birthday of the noted Australian poet and novelist David Malouf, born 1,977 years later, who wrote An Imaginary Life, a novel about the final years of Ovid’s life, spent in exile.

What are the odds?

Ovid was born in a small town about 90 miles east of Rome. His family was well-off and sent him to Rome to be educated and Athens to be finished off (educationally speaking). He blew off his study of rhetoric to write poetry (kids—am I right?), and knew early success with his poems focusing on love and intrigue, culminating in Ars Amatoria (1 BCE), a manual of seduction that may have offended the Emperor Augustus, who was bent on moral reform. After that he wrote Fasti, about Roman religious festivals, a patriotic, flag-waving, suck-up-to-the-imperial-family sort of poem. Then he wrote Metamorphoses (8 CE), a poem in 15 books that brought to life over 250 Greek myths, many of them obscure before Ovid got to them. They all had something to do with transformation, at least loosely. The poem has had an enormous impact on Western art and literature.

Just as all was going swimmingly, Ovid was exiled to Tomis, a port city on the Black Sea at the very edge of the Roman empire, far from all the sophistication and pleasures to which Ovid was accustomed. Plus the weather was crappy. He continued to write poetry but was depressed and never made it out of exile. No one knows for sure why Ovid was exiled, though it may have had something to do with Ars Amatoria and/or the fact that Augusta’s granddaughter committed adultery or incest or both (like you do) and was herself exiled; Ovid may have discovered something he wasn’t supposed to know. Ovid died in Tomis in 17 CE.

Malouf was born in 1934 in Queensland, Australia, of Lebanese and English-Jewish parents. He studied at the University of Queensland, went to England for a time, but returned to Australia in 1968 and lectured at the University of Sydney. He turned to writing full-time in 1978, the same year that his second novel, An Imaginary Life, was published. This novel, written in “lyrical, condensed language,” imagines that Ovid in exile encounters a wild boy living in nature; the two bond, with the boy teaching Ovid to transcend his Roman world view and embrace nature. While the novel has nothing explicitly to do with Australia, critics have pointed out that Australians have experienced their own forms of exile. Non-Indigenous Australians have felt themselves living on the edges of various powerful “empires,” while Indigenous Australians have been literally exiled from their homes by European colonists. At the same time, the novel speaks to the transforming effect of Indigenous attitudes toward the land on non-Indigenous perspectives.

Malouf has written around 30 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry collections, and nonfiction. He’s won many international literary awards and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011, which was won that year by—wait for it—Philip Roth, whose birthday was yesterday.

Be well on this fine Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.