Brief Biography

Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney in 1931. After her early education she left Australia in 1947 and has lived in Hong Kong, New Zealand, Europe and the USA. Between the years 1952 and 1962 she worked in the United Nations as a clerical employee. She left that institution to become a full-time writer and has since become a passionate opponent of the United Nations, detailing her opinion of its weaknesses in Defeat of an Ideal in 1973, and commenting on the Kurt Waldheim case in 1990 in Countenance of Truth. She is now an American citizen and divides her time between New York and Capri.

She won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980 for The Transit of Venus. She delivered the ABC's Boyer lectures in 1984. These were later published in book form in 1985 as Coming of Age in Australia.

Bibliography

Novels
The Evening of the Holiday 1966
People in Glass Houses 1967
The Bay of Noon 1970
The Transit of Venus 1980
The Great Fire 2003

Short Story Collections
Cliffs of Fall 1963

Non-Fiction
Defeat of an Ideal 1973
Coming of Age in Australia 1985
Countenance of Truth 1990
Greene on Capri 2001

This page and its contents are copyright ©2001-05 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: January 15, 2005.