SHIRLEY HAZZARD

An illuminating portrait of the esteemed Australian-born fiction writer and essayist.

With her early fiction in the 1960s and ’70s, Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was quickly recognized as a prose stylist of distinctive intelligence and insight. In 1980, The Transit of Venus firmly secured her standing, in particular among other writers; more than 20 years later, The Great Fire won the National Book Award and garnered her a new readership. In this scrupulously researched biography, Olubas, an English professor at the University of New South Wales and editor of two volumes of Hazzard’s work, charts the meandering course of Hazzard’s life and travels, drawing on events and impressions that would inform much of her writing. The author begins with Hazzard’s early years growing up in Sydney and moves through her experiences as a teen living in Hong Kong and her family’s move to New York City, where, at age 20, she landed a job at the United Nations. Working as a Secretariat typist for the next 10 years, she gathered critical insights into the organization, which she would use in her later nonfiction work. Throughout these early years, Hazzard also had a series of love affairs, adding further grist for her fiction. Olubas describes Hazzard’s journey as a process of self-invention, noting how “she embarked early on a project of self-cultivation and self-creation through extensive and passionate reading. Throughout her adult life she mixed in elevated cultural circles, seeking out people to admire and learn from.” One of those people was Francis Steegmuller, with whom she shared a long, satisfying marriage. They traveled extensively and kept homes in New York and Capri, and though her reputation within the literary community was well established, upon her marriage, that influential circle expanded further. Olubas provides numerous anecdotes about their encounters with many of the leading literary figures of their time, including Graham Greene, W.H. Auden, Muriel Spark, and Saul Bellow. Throughout, Olubas offers a discerning, cleareyed perspective of Hazzard’s complex character and a persuasive appraisal of what distinguishes her work.

An absorbing, well-crafted profile of a supremely gifted writer.