Shirley Hazzard

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.
Hazzard's 1970 novel The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010; 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.
Early life
Hazzard was born in Sydney, the younger daughter 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. She attended Queenwood School for Girls in Mosman, New South Wales, but left in 1947 when her father became a diplomat and was posted to Hong Kong.
Hazzard's parents had intended for her to study at the university there, but it had been destroyed in the war. Instead, at age 16, she began working for the British Combined Intelligence Services, until she was "brutally removed by destiny" – first to Australia, as her sister was ill, and then to New Zealand, when her father became Australian Trade Commissioner there. She said of her experience of the East that "I began to feel that people could enjoy life, should enjoy life".
At age 20, in 1951, Hazzard and her family moved to New York City and she worked at the United Nations Secretariat as a typist for about 10 years. In 1956, she was posted to Naples for a year and began to explore Italy; she visited annually for several years afterward.
Writing
Hazzard wrote her first short story, "Woollahra Road", in 1960 while in Siena, and it was accepted and published by The New Yorker magazine the next year. She resigned from her position at the United Nations and began writing full time. Her first book, Cliffs of Fall, published in 1963, was a collection of stories that had previously appeared in the magazine. Her first novel, The Evening of the Holiday, was published in 1966. Her second, The Bay of Noon, appeared in 1970, and follows British people in Italy shortly after World War II. The Guardian has called The Transit of Venus, Hazzard's third novel, her "breakthrough". It follows a pair of sisters from Australia who are living very different lives in postwar Britain. American academic Michael Gorra writes: "Its social landscape will be familiar to any reader of Lessing or Murdoch or Drabble, and yet it is not an English novel. Hazzard lacks the concern with gentility – for or against – that marks almost all English writers of her generation. She has the keenest of eyes for the nuances of class ... and yet doesn't appear to have anything herself at stake in getting it all down."
Hazzard's final novel, The Great Fire, appeared more than 20 years later. Its protagonist is a British war hero in Asia a few years after the war.
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. Countenance of Truth alleges that senior international diplomats had been aware of the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim yet allowed him to rise through the Secretariat ranks to the position of Secretary-General, a claim she first made in a 1980 New Republic article. Her collection of short stories, People in Glass Houses, is presented as a satire on "The Organisation", manifestly inspired by the United Nations.
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. Critics have called Hazzard's style "austere" and concise.
Critics have noted that Hazzard's characters and plots often mirrored events and people in her own life. According to one commentator, Hazzard's early life "was a carbon copy of Helen Driscoll's" (the heroine of The Great Fire). 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. In addition, Helen Driscoll has to move to New Zealand, as Hazzard did. Similarly, the character of Elizabeth in Hazzard's short story "Sir Cecil's Ride" is young, living in Hong Kong, and working for Combined Services Intelligence.
Christine Kearney wrote in The Canberra Times that Hazzard's "fine and formal prose features high-minded protagonists who prize love, beauty and art, and who are frequently hamstrung by the philistines or the callous in their midst", adding, "while Hazzard has a peerless elegance and effortless control over her material, her occasional haughtiness may seem naive to a contemporary audience."
It has been suggested that Hazzard’s prose reflects her love of poetry, which expresses itself through her allusiveness, subtle repetition, use of metaphor and “concern with all the unseen forces that impinge on everyday reality”.
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."
Awards and honours
In 1977, Hazzard's short story "A Long Story Short", originally published in The New Yorker on 26 July 1976, received an O. Henry Award. 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 2004 Miles Franklin Award, and the 2005 William Dean Howells Medal; it was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, and named a 2003 Book of the Year by The Economist. 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, and 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. They also kept an apartment in New York City. Hazzard and Steegmuller would go to New York in August, “to write in peace, as no one is there”, and then return to Italy in Autumn.
Steegmuller died in 1994.
Hazzard died in New York City on 12 December 2016, aged 85. She was reported to have had dementia.
Works
Novels
The Evening of the Holiday (1966)
The Bay of Noon (1970), shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize
The Transit of Venus (1980), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction
The Great Fire (2003), winner of the National Book Award for fiction and the Miles Franklin Award
Short story collections
Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963)
People in Glass Houses (1967)
Non-fiction
Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-destruction of the United Nations (1973)
Coming of Age in Australia (1985)
Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990)
Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000)
The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008) (with Francis Steegmuller)
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays (2016)
Literature
Brigitta Olubas: Shirley Hazzard : a writing life, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022,
References
Further reading
Birgitta Olubas: Shirley Hazzard : a writing life, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022,
External links
Shirley Hazzard's profile at the British Council website
Shirley Hazzard's profile at Virago Press
Radio interview on KZSU, Stanford University
Geoff Dyer, "Written in the stars", The New Statesman, 28 June 2004
Brigitta Olubas, "Shirley Hazzard's Australia: Belated Reading and Cultural Mobility", Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Finding aid to Shirley Hazzard papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
1931 births
2016 deaths
20th-century American novelists
21st-century American novelists
20th-century Australian novelists
21st-century Australian novelists
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American women writers
American foreign policy writers
American memoirists
American women novelists
American women short story writers
American people of Scottish descent
American people of Welsh descent
Australian memoirists
Australian women short story writers
Australian women novelists
Australian people of Scottish descent
Australian people of Welsh descent
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Capri, Campania
National Book Award winners
O. Henry Award winners
Miles Franklin Award winners
Writers from Sydney
20th-century American short story writers
21st-century American short story writers
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners
20th-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
American women memoirists
20th-century Australian women