The Twyborn Affair

infobox Book |
name = The Twyborn Affair
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author = Patrick White
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country = Australia
language = English
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publisher = Vintage Press
release_date = 1979
media_type = Print (hardback and paperback)
pages = 432 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-09-945821-7
preceded_by = A Fringe of Leaves
followed_by = Memoirs of Many in One

"The Twyborn Affair" is a novel by Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White, first published in 1979. The three parts of the novel are set in a villa on the French Riviera before the First World War, a sheep station on the edge of Australia's Snowy Mountains in the inter-war period, and in London in the lead-up to the Second World War. White charts the transmigration of a soul through three different identities—Eudoxia, Eddie, and Eadith—two of them in female guise.

As in many of White's novels, the main focus is on identity; White views his subject from masculine–feminine, colonial–English, rural–metropolitan, and bourgeois–bohemian polarities. The writing has been described as vivid and painterly in its attention to landscape, and remorseless in its critical dissection of social conventions. The novel is a virtuosic display of White's characteristic "wicked" humour.

"The Twyborn Affair" was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1979, but was removed at the request of the author, that it make way for the work of younger and more deserving writers. This reflects White's refusal, later in life, of all literary awards. He made an exception for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but sent a surrogate to Sweden to accept the award on his behalf.