Nervous work, great results

“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

Born in Australia on Jan. 30. 1931, Hazzard had dual Australian-American citizenship and spent most of her adult life living in the U.S.   A novelist, short story writer, and essayist, she wrote several award-winning books, including the novels The Bay of Noon, shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and The Great Fire, winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.  Hazzard also wrote non-fiction, including two books based on her experiences working at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.

After moving around the globe with her diplomat father, Hazzard landed her job with the U.N. in the late 1950s and wrote her first short story, "Woollahra Road" for The New Yorker magazine in 1960.  More successes with her writing followed and soon she resigned from the U.N. to concentrate full time on her writing. 

        While her second book The Bay of Noon was her first award winner, it was her third novel, The Guardian, that made her an international best selling writer.  That book follows a pair of sisters from Australia, living very different lives from each other in post-war Britain. 

“It’s a nervous work,” she said about writing.  “The state that you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of.”

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