Published in 2019
80 pages
Michelle de Kretser is an Australian novelist who was born in Sri Lanka but moved to Australia when she was 14. She was educated in Melbourne and Paris, and published her first novel, The Rose Grower in 1999. Her second novel, published in 2003, The Hamilton Case was winner of the Tasmania Pacific Prize, the Encore Award (UK) and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Southeast Asia and Pacific). The Lost Dog was published in 2007. It was one of 13 books on the long list for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. From 1989 to 1992 she was a founding editor of the Australian Women’s Book Review.
What is this book about?
Hazzard was the first Australian writer I read who looked outwards, away from Australia. Her work spoke of places from which I had come and places to which I longed to go … It was reading as an affair of revelations and gifts. It fell like rain, greening my vision of Australian literature as a stony country where I would never feel at home.
In this powerful and exhilarating essay on Shirley Hazzard, Michelle de Kretser offers a masterclass in engaging with a writer’s work. She illuminates the precision of Hazzard’s electrifying prose, and celebrates the intelligence, wit and fierce humanity of her fiction.
In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.
