Shirley Hazzard (30 January 1931 – 12 December 2016) was an Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was born in Australia and also held U.S. citizenship. her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, the Miles Franklin Award and the William Dean Howells Medal. Hazzard also wrote nonfiction, including two books based on her experiences working at the United Nations Secretariat, which were highly critical of the organisation. of a Welsh father (Reginald Hazzard) and a Scottish mother (Catherine Stein Hazzard), both of whom immigrated to Australia in the 1920s and who met while they were working for the firm that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Hazzard's parents had intended for her to study at the university there, but it had been destroyed in the war. In 1956, she was posted to Naples for a year and began to explore Italy; she visited annually for several years afterward.

Hazzard's final novel, The Great Fire, appeared more than 20 years later.

In addition to fiction, Hazzard wrote two nonfiction books critical of the United Nations: Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990). Defeat of an Ideal presents evidence of the apparently widespread McCarthyism in the Secretariat from 1951 to 1955.

Hazzard wrote Greene on Capri, a memoir of her friendship with her husband Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert scholar, and his comrade in literature and travel Graham Greene, whom she met in the 1960s and considered an influence. Her last work of nonfiction, The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008), is a collection of writings on Naples co-authored by Steegmuller.

Style and themes

Hazzard admired the writing of Henry James and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and critics have noted similarities to their work, particularly in the use of dialogue. Helen and her brother, the dying Benedict, are described as "wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature", and Hazzard once said that poetry had always been the centre of her life.

Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times that Greene on Capri "was a two-decade crossword puzzle that the novelist Shirley Hazzard began that day, presuming out of her habitual restraint and courtesy upon the privilege of the tiny literary freemasonry that still could speak yards of poetry by heart." The Transit of Venus won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award and was included in The Australian Collection, a compendium of Australia's greatest books. The Great Fire garnered the 2003 National Book Award, The Bay of Noon was nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010.

Hazzard was a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the British Royal Society of Literature, as well as an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 1984, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation invited her to give the Boyer Lectures, a series of radio talks delivered each year by a prominent Australian. The talks were published the next year under the title Coming of Age in Australia. In 2012, a conference was held in her honour at the New York Society Library and Columbia University.

Personal life

In 1963, Hazzard married the writer Francis Steegmuller, and the couple moved to Europe. They initially lived in Paris, with visits to Italy, and in the early 1970s settled in Capri.

Works

Novels

  • The Evening of the Holiday (1966)
  • People in Glass Houses (1967)