Jessica Anderson (writer) country of citizenship Australia
Jessica Margaret Anderson (née Queale; 25 September 1916 – 9 July 2010) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. Born in Gayndah, Anderson lived the bulk of her life in Sydney apart from a few years in London.  She began her career writing short stories for newspapers and drama scripts for radio, especially adaptations of well-known novels. Embarking on her career as a novelist relatively late in life - her first novel was published when she was 47 - her early novels attracted little attention. She rose to prominence upon the publication of her fourth novel, Tirra Lirra by the River, published in 1978. Although she remains best known for this work, several of her novels have garnered high acclaim, most notably The Impersonators (1980) and Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories (1987), both of which have won awards. She won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice, and has been published in Britain and the United States. Jessica Anderson died at Elizabeth Bay, New South Wales in 2010, following a stroke. She was the mother of Australian screenwriter Laura Jones, her only child.Life as a commercial writer
In 1935, at the age of 18, Anderson left her Brisbane home to live in Sydney. Despite the fact that she spent her childhood in Queensland, she stated in interviews that she felt more affinity with Sydney, the city where she was to spend the bulk of her adult life. There she subsisted on wages from a number of sources, including a slide-painting job, and a job designing electric signs, where she was able to make use of her art school training, and later from work in shops and factories. She and her friends lived at Potts Point in "big seedy decaying mansions with gardens running right down to the harbour." In a city still recovering from the ravages of The Great Depression, life for Anderson was not altogether easy: "Times were very hard," she recalled; "People were poor, but very free. We had a good life."As Anderson remained throughout her life evasive about the details of her life as a commercial writer, it is not known when she began writing commercially under pseudonyms, what those pseudonyms were, or, indeed, how much she wrote. She revealed only that she began writing for magazines and newspapers out of commercial necessity, and rarely under her own name. Although she achieved success later in this field, she sometimes stated that, as her writing improved, her pieces were more frequently turned down for publication. In her thirties, she began to write for commercial radio. Beginning with half-hour slots, Anderson gradually became interested in the technique of crafting radio plays, and began submitting some of her better work to the ABC under her own name. She later ascribed her fondness for writing the expansive dialogue in her novels to her early experience writing radio plays.It was in Sydney that Anderson met her first husband, Ross McGill, with whom she lived for three years before their marriage in 1940. Anderson described McGill as "a commercial artist who longed to be a painter." Tragically, nearly all of his works were destroyed in a fire, and Anderson was left with only a few drawings of his that he had given to a mutual friend, who then generously shared them with Anderson.Anderson and McGill temporarily relocated to London in 1937. There, Anderson found employment that she described as "donkey work": she did research for a magazine named Townsman, and worked as a typist. Meanwhile, her husband, McGill, worked as a layout artist for Lever Brothers Agency, while continuing to paint in his spare time. While some critics have proffered this stint in England as evidence of the semi-autobiographical nature of Tirra Lirra by the River, Anderson rejected such claims, asserting that, while all of her characters had something of her in them, none were entirely autobiographical.In 1940, Anderson and McGill returned to Sydney. During the war, Anderson worked as a seasonal fruit picker in the Australian Women's Land Army. She gave birth to her only child, Laura Jones (née McGill) in 1946. Jones now works as a film and television screenwriter in Australia.
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