“Sometimes,
surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to
fact? To be accurate is not to be right.” – Shirley Hazzard
An Australian-American novelist, short story
writer and essayist Hazzard was born in Australia on this date in 1931. After first writing short stories, she became a major international novelist after her 1970 novel The
Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2003, her novel The Great Fire won
three major awards for fiction – the U.S. National Book Award, the Miles
Franklin Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal.
Hazzard first moved to New York City when
she was 20, starting a 10-year job with the United Nations Secretariat
and ultimately leading to her authorship of two books that were highly critical
of the organization. In her book Countenance
of Truth Hazzard alleged that senior international diplomats had been aware
of the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim yet had allowed him to rise through the ranks
to become U.N. Secretary-General.
In 1963 she married U.S. writer
Francis Steegmuller and they moved to Europe, living
in Paris and then on the Isle of Capri while also maintaining a New York
apartment. She was back in New York at the time of her death in
2016.
About being a writer, she once noted: “It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state
that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.”
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