Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life with Sheridan Hay

In Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, the extraordinary life of the award-winning writer is captured in full for the first time. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard’s authorized biographer, draws on Hazzard’s fiction—which itself drew on her lived experiences—as well as her extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks, and on memories of her surviving friends and family, to create this vibrant portrait of an exceptional woman.

This biography attends to the distinctive times of Hazzard’s life, from youth and middle age to her long widowhood, dementia, and death, and it traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath it all. Olubas also presents a history of the sites of Hazzard’s life, those described in her characteristic, lyrical evocations of place: her childhood in Depression-era Sydney; her youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; her years in literary New York in the 1950s—at the United Nations and the New Yorker—and her time in postwar Naples and Capri. At last, Hazzard’s life, as seen through her own writing, stories, and archival photographs, is set down on the page, and it completes and deepens our understanding of her fiction.

As Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times: “Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: ‘We are human beings, not rational ones.’” Here, in Shirley Hazzard, is the story of a remarkable human being.