Shirley Hazzard is a well-known Australian writer, most famous for The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, which won both the Miles Franklin award and the US National Book Award for Fiction.
As with all successful creative people, we claim Hazzard as our own. And yet, although she was born here, she lived most of her life away from Australia and held American citizenship. Her peripatetic upbringing was due to her father’s diplomatic postings. The time in Hong Kong was transformative, with a failed love interest and later reconnection worthy of her own fiction.
Olubas is a forensic researcher and doesn’t take Hazzard at her own word. For instance, Hazzard was keen on saying both parents were born overseas, suiting her personal narrative of being more than just a culturally remote Australian. Olubas’s research says otherwise.
Nonetheless, the details of Hazzard’s life are eventful, and this book does cover them, but the greatest interest within these pages is her relationship with her writing and with other writers.
Olubas’s writing is dense.
This is not an easy book to dive into, nor is it a quick read. However, the construction rendered from its varied sources is utterly compelling and convincing.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brigitta Olubas is Professor of English. Principal research areas include: Australian Literature and transnational writing, Australian modernity, literary and visual culture studies, gender studies and narrative ethics.
She published the first scholarly monograph of Shirley Hazzard’s writing and recently edited two volumes of Shirley Hazzard’s work: We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays and Collected Stories.
She has published widely in the areas of Australian literary and visual culture.
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