Shirley Hazzard

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Shirley Hazzard, who was born on January 30, 1931 in Sydney, Australia, is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Although she holds both British and American citizenship, she is considered by many Australians to be an Australian novelist^[1].

Contents 1 Life and work 2 Works 2.1 Novels 2.2 Short story collections 2.3 Non-fiction 3 Notes 4 External links

[edit] Life and work

Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia. As of 2006, she lives in New York City and travels frequently to Italy, where she stays at her residence in Capri. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994.

Hazzard's first book, the story collection Cliffs of Fall, was published in 1963. In 1977 her short story "A Long Story Short", originally published in The New Yorker on July 26, 1976, received an O. Henry Award. The Transit of Venus, her third novel, won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award^[2]. Her next novel, The Great Fire, garnered the 2003 National Book Award and the 2004 Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, "longlisted" for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, and named a 2003 Book of the Year by The Economist^[3].

In addition to her fiction, Hazzard has written two books critiquing the United Nations—Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990)—and Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000), recounting her friendship with the writer Graham Greene.

In 1984 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation invited Hazzard to give the Boyer Lectures, a series of radio talks delivered each year by a prominent Australian, which it published as a book the following year under the title Coming of Age in Australia.

[edit] Works

[edit] Novels

• The Evening of the Holiday (1966)
• The Bay of Noon (1970)
• The Transit of Venus (1980)
• The Great Fire (2003)

[edit] Short story collections

• Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963)
• People in Glass Houses (1967)

[edit] Non-fiction

• Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-destruction of the United Nations (1973)
• Coming of Age in Australia (1985)
• Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990)
• Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000)

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Shirley Hazzard with Sally Loane. 702 ABC Sydney. Retrieved on December 15, 2006.
2. ^ National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Powell's Books website. Retrieved on May 22, 2006.
3. ^ Words of love and war. The Economist (30 October 2003). Retrieved on January 19, 2007.

[edit] External links

• Shirley Hazzard's profile in the British Council's database of contemporary writers in the UK and British Commonwealth.
• Shirley Hazzard's profile at Virago
• Judith Shulevitz's review of The Great Fire (2003) at Slate.com
• Charles Taylor's review of The Great Fire (2003) at Salon.com
• Defining Australia: History and Identity The sixth program in special series by ABC Radio National which was broadcast on 6 April 2003 and based on an anthology of previous Boyer Lectures. A transcript of the broadcast, which features a brief excerpt from Hazzard's 1984 Boyer Lectures, Coming of Age in Australia, is available.
• Shirley Hazzard with Sally Loane A ten minute radio interview with Sally Loane for 702 ABC Sydney broadcast on 16 June 2005. Audio is in RealMedia format; it requires RealPlayer.
• Shirley Hazzard on the Leonard Lopate Show An eighteen minute radio interview with Leonard Lopate for WNYC, New York Public Radio, broadcast on 17 November 2003.
• Our Man on Capri A letter from Yvonne Cloetta, Graham Greene's last companion, to The New York Review of Books in response to David Lodge's review of Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000) and Shirley Hazzard's reply in NYRB, Volume 47, Number 19 · November 30, 2000.