Janette Turner Hospital

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Janette Turner Hospital (née Turner) (born 12 November 1942) is an Australian-born novelist and short story writer. She is also a teacher of literature and creative writing, has often been a writer-in-residence, and is the Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of South Carolina.

Contents

[edit] Life

Janette Turner was born in Melbourne, Australia to Pentecostal Christian parents. Her family moved to Queensland in 1950. There was no television or radio in the house when she was young, and her family "had a Biblical metaphor for every occasion".[1] She discovered a new world of words and language when she started school.[1]

She studied at the University of Queensland and Kelvin Grove Teachers College, gaining a BA in 1965. She later taught in North Queensland and Brisbane. She married Clifford Hospital, a theologian and scholar, in 1965. The couple moved to Boston, in the United States, in 1967, for her husband to take a Harvard Fellowship. They later moved to Kingston, Ontario, Canada. During these years, she worked as a librarian at Harvard University, and then undertook her Master of Arts in medieval literature at Queen's University in Canada.[1] They also spent a year, 1977/78, in southern India where she wrote her short story Waiting, which she later expanded in the novel The Ivory Swing.[2] She has said: "My life has been very geographically dislocated, and a way of dealing with that is passion for the physical landscape. But I also think I just learned very quickly to be an acute observer of social and political systems".[1]

In 1999, she was accepted a chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English, University of South Carolina, succeeding Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Dickey.

Hospital has held writer-in-residence positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, the University of Sydney and La Trobe University in Melbourne. She divides her time between Canada, the United States and Queensland.

[edit] Writing career

Her first piece of fiction, a short story titled "Waiting", was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1978 and received an 'Atlantic First' citation.

While her novels tend to centre around a central question, her 2007 novel Orpheus Lost explores several questions relating including how individuals might react to discovering a terrorist in their family, the balancing individual rights with national security, and individual accountability for government actions.[1]

Hospital describes the driving philosophy behind her novels as follows: "I despair, therefore I insist on hope ... I do believe in redemptive moments I no longer have a safe structure in any traditional sense, but I do believe that redemptive moments exist and that deeply flawed human beings are capable of great and redemptive moments toward other human beings. And that's what I celebrate, For me, that's what the books are about".[1]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

  • The Ivory Swing (1982)
  • The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (1983)
  • Borderline (1985)
  • Charades (1988)
  • A Very Proper Death as by "Alex Juniper", (1990)
  • The Last Magician (1992)
  • Oyster (1996)
  • Due Preparations for the Plague (2003)
  • Orpheus Lost (2007)

[edit] Short stories

  • Dislocations (1986)
  • Isobars (1990)
  • Collected Stories 1970–1995 (1995)
  • North of Nowhere, South of Loss (2003)

[edit] Awards and Nominations

  • 1982 - Seal Award
  • 1992 - New York Times Notable Book of the Year for The Last Magician
  • 1998 - New York Times Notable Book of the Year for Oyster
  • 2003 - Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Fiction Book Award for Due Preparations For The Plague
  • 2003 - Davitt Award for best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman for Due Preparations For The Plague
  • 2003 - Patrick White Award for literature

Several of her novels have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award: Charade in 1989, The Last Magician in 1993, and Oyster in 1997.

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f Sibree (2007)
  2. ^ of Queensland Alumni

[edit] References

Persondata
NAME Hospital, Janette Turner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Contemporary Australian novelist and short story writer
SHORT DESCRIPTION Contemporary Australian writer and academic
DATE OF BIRTH 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH