Lily Brett OAM (b. 1946) is a New York-based novelist, essayist and poet. Born to survivors of Auschwitz, Brett emigrated to Melbourne with her family 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. Brett published her first collection of poetry in 1986, The Auschwitz Poems, illustrated by her husband, painter David Rankin. 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. 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).
Renowned portrait photographer Jacqueline Mitelman has captured her friend Lily Brett with great style and sensitivity against a dramatic black background.
Purchased with funds provided by Jillian Broadbent AC 2021
© Jacqueline Mitelman
Jillian Broadbent AC (7 portraits supported)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Australian photographer, Jacqueline Mitelman, discusses her process for creating portraiture.
Well behaved women seldom make history, as the saying goes, and the National Portrait Gallery, consequently, is full of awesome Australian women who refused to conform to narrow ideas about their place and their worth.
