Lily Brett OAM (b. 1946) is a New York-based novelist, essayist and poet. She was born to survivors of Auschwitz who brought her to Melbourne with them when she was two. In her twenties, Brett worked as a journalist on the music magazine Go-Set, and on Uptight, a television pop-music program. In the summer of 1967 she travelled to the UK and then the USA to cover the Monterey International Pop Festival, where she interviewed rock stars including Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. She later included them in her 2013 novel Lola Bensky – about a child of Auschwitz survivors who works as a music reporter – which won the Prix Médicis Étranger in France. Brett published her first collection of poetry in 1986, The Auschwitz Poems, illustrated by her second husband, painter David Rankin. She won the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry in 1987. In 1989 she and Rankin moved to New York with their three children. The following year she published her first novel, Things Could be Worse. Just like that (1994) won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and her bestselling 2001 novel, Too Many Men, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. It was followed by a sequel, You Gotta Have Balls, in 2005. She has published nine volumes of poetry, several of them on the theme of the Holocaust, and five collections of essays, including Old Seems to be Other People (2021).
