Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) writer, spent her childhood in Sydney but left with her parents at the age of sixteen for South East Asia and New Zealand. In 1956 she went to Italy, and lived in Naples. In 1963 she married a writer, Francis Steegmuller; while based in New York, the couple also became part of Graham Greene's circle of friends on Capri. Hazzard's first book, the short story collection Cliffs of Fall, appeared in 1963. In her long career she has produced only four novels including The Bay of Noon (1970) The Transit of Venus (1980) which won the National Book Critic Circle Award; and The Great Fire (2003) which won Australia's National Book Award and Miles Franklin Award , was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and won the prestigious William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for 2005. (Hazzard holds American citizenship.) In 2010, The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize (in 1970, no Booker Prize was awarded; in 2010, the situation was redressed by popular vote). Hazzard has written two books about the United Nations, Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990) and an account of her friendship with Graham Greene, Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000). Hazzard gave the ABC Boyer Lectures in 1984; in 1985, they were published as Coming of Age in Australia.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2011
© Lorrie Graham
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