M.J. Hyland | |
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Born | 6 June 1968 (age 43) London, England |
Occupation | Novelist, Lecturer |
Nationality | British |
Period | 2000-present |
Maria Joan Hyland (born 6 June 1968) is a novelist. She made her debut in Australia in 2003 with How the Light Gets In. Her second novel Carry Me Down was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and won both the Encore Award and the Hawthornden Prize in 2007. Hyland currently lives in Manchester, England, where she is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.[1]
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Maria Joan Hyland was born in London to Irish parents. When she was two years old her family moved to Australia, but returned to Dublin after a few years, where Hyland spent her early childhood. When she was eleven years old, the family once again travelled to Australia, settling in Melbourne. After finishing school she worked briefly in film and television — appearing uncredited in an episode of Carson's Law and working for a time as a Director's Assistant on the Hinch program — before completing an Arts/Law degree at the University of Melbourne in 1996. She worked as a lawyer for about six years. In 2004 she completed a M.A. in English at the University of Melbourne.
Hyland moved to London in 2005. In 2006, she lived in Rome thanks to an Australia Council scholarship.[2] She teaches at the Manchester Centre for New Writing.
Hyland was first published at the age of 17 in Australian Short Stories.[3]
Through the 1990s Hyland edited the now defunct literary magazine Nocturnal Submissions.[4] One of her early stories was published in the magazine New York Stories, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Hyland can work painstakingly and has at times taken a week to write a single paragraph.[5] In 2002 she received an Australia Council grant to complete the final draft of her first novel, and to work on the first and second draft of a second novel about "family, first-love and lies."[6]
Her first novel How the Light Gets In (2003) was published by Penguin in Australia, and then the following year by Canongate in the United Kingdom. It has been translated into many languages, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and took third place in the 2005 Barnes and Noble Discover Award. In 2004 Hyland was jointly awarded the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelist Award for How the Light Gets In.
Her second novel, Carry Me Down, was published in 2006 by Canongate, and was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Europe and South Asia Region). Hyland's writing style has been described as claustrophobic, and she has been dubbed "the mistress of the telling detail".[7]
Hyland has also written a short-story[8] and non-fiction piece[9] for Australian magazine The Monthly.