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¤@¤E¤»¤T¦~¤@¤ë¡A«¢¿A¼w¦b¯Ã¬ù¤Í¤H¿p¨½·R¡E¥v¬£§J¡]Muriel Spark¡^Á|¿ìªº®b·|¤W¹J¨£ªkÄõ¦è´µ¡E¥v¸¦®æ¿p°Ç¡]Francis Steegmuller 1906-1994 ¡AµÛ¦W¤å¾ÇĶªÌ¡B¶Ç°O®a¡^¡A¾Ú«¢¿A¼wªº»¡ªk¡A¤G¤H¬O¤@¨£Á鱡¡A©ó¤@¤E¤»¤T¦~¤Q¤G¤ë¤G¤Q¤G¤éµ²±B«á¡A·h¶i¯Ã¬ù°Ò«¢¹y¤WªF°Ï¡]Upper East Side¡^¡A¤£®É©¹ªð¸q¤j§Q¨º¤£°Ç´µ¤Î¥d¥¬¨½®q¡]Capri¡^´J©Ò¡C¤G¤HÄâ¤â¨«¹L¤T¤Q¤@¦~±B«Ã¡Aª½¨ì¤@¤E¤E¥|¦~¤Q¤ë¡A¤K¤Q¤K·³ªº¥v¸¦®æ¿p°Ç¦]¤ßŦ°IºÜÃã¥@¬°¤î¡C¦b³\¦h¤½¶}¥Xª©ªº«¢¿A¼w¶Ç°O¸ê®Æ¤¤¡A¤Ï¬M¥X¥v¸¦®æ¿p°Ç¦b¥@®É¡A»P«¢¿A¼w©Ò¦@¨Éªº¤å¾Ç¥Í²P±j«×¡C¤V¤Ò¹ï¤å¾Çªº¼ö·R¡A¤]¶¡±µÂ×´I¤F«¢¿A¼wªº¼g§@»P½Í¸Ü¤º®e¡C¤»¡³¦~¥Nªì´Á°_¡A¤Ò°ü¤G¤H¹ï¯Ã¬ù¤å¾Ç¤Î¤å¤Æªº¼vÅT¤O¤@ª½«ùÄò¨ì¥v¸¦®æ¿p°Ç¹L¥@¬°¤î¡C¦b«¢¿A¼w¤E¡³¦~¥NµÛ§@¤¤¡A¥]¬A¤@¤E¤E¤C¦~³·±ù¾Ç°|¡]Sydney Institute¡^ªº¤½¶}ºt»¡¡A¦b¦bÅã¥Ü¦o°Ñ»P°ê»Ú¤å¾Ç¤Î¤å¤Æ¨Æ·~¤£½ù¡A¨ä¤¤¤]¤£¥F¿D¬wµ¥Ä³ÃD¡C

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References

“Shirley Hazzard,” in Contemporary Authors Online. (A profile of the author's life and works)  

“Shirley Hazzard,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 289: Australian Writers, 1950-1975. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Selina Samuels. Gale, 2004, pp. 114-120.

 
 
 
 
 

     
Shirley Hazzard
1931-
Novelist, Story Writer
May Su/Ĭ¤l´f
 

 Family Background
 United Nations
 Marriage
 Works
 Popular fiction clashing with literary fiction: Stephen King vs. Shirley Hazzard
 Expatriate
 Current Situation

 

 Family Background
 


Born on January 30, 1931 in Sydney, Australia, Shirley Hazzard is a writer and novelist who grew up in upper-middle-class Mosman. She is the daughter of Reginald Hazzard and Catherine Stein Hazzard. Her Welsh father and Scottish mother had met in Sydney while working for the British firm that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 1920s, and they remained in Sydney after marriage. At the age of four, Hazzard strated an early fondness for poetry, and considers the poets are her mentors. Later she attended Queenwood College in Sydney and had her first encounter with Italy when she saw some Italian prisoners of war. Italy then played an enormous role in her writing and life. Hazzard traveled the world during her early years, a result of her parents' diplomatic postings. In 1947, at the age of 16, she was engaged by the British Intelligence in Hong Kong to monitor the civil war in China. Hazzard remained in Hong Kong for two years, then traveled with her family to Wellington, New Zealand, for two years, then on via London to New York, where her father was appointed Australian trade commissioner in 1950.

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 United Nations
 

 

In 1951, her parents announced their separation and decided to leave New York. Hazzard chose to remain there and took up a position as a clerical employee in the United Nations Secretariat between the years 1952 and 1962. In the autumn of 1956, she was transferred to Naples for one year and began her lifelong passion for the city which inspired her writing. In 1962, her continued work with The New Yorker allowed her the financial freedom to leave the United Nations and become a full-time writer. She had since become a passionate opponent of the United Nations, detailing her opinion of its weaknesses in Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations in 1973. She has also written nonfiction works Countenance of Truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim Case  (1990) about the Kurt Waldheim case, and the memoir Greene on Capri: A Memoir  (2000) about her friend, Graham Greene. In 1985, Coming of Age in Australia was published, a collection of her Australian Broadcasting Corporation Boyer lectures.

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 Marriage


In January 1963, Hazzard met Francis Steegmuller (1906-1994), an eminent literary translator and biographer, at a party given by their mutual friend Muriel Spark in New York. Hazzard later described the encounter as love at first sight. Hazzard and Steegmuller married on December 22, 1963. Hazzard and Steegmuller lived in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and apartments in Naples and Capri from the time of their marriage until Steegmuller's death in October 1994 from heart failure at the age of eighty-eight. The intensity of their shared literary lives characterizes much of the published biographical information about Hazzard. Steegmuller's literary passions also proliferated Hazzard's writing and conversation. Their contributions to the literary and cultural establishments of New York were sustained from the early 1960s until Steegmuller's death. Hazzard's own literary output through the 1990s, including a speech delivered in 1997 to the Sydney Institute, evidences her continuing participation in an international literary and cultural life as well as Australian issues.

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 Works


Shirley Hazzard describes herself as a slow writer who finds the process of literary creation both rewarding and painstaking. She is a writer with an extraordinary appreciation for the terrible beauty and power of words in the human condition. Throughout her career, she has produced six novels, a number of short stories including one compendium, essays, articles and four non-fiction works, which include two scathing attacks on the United Nations as well as critical reviews, interviews and discussions. Within Hazzard's novels, romance is an inner journey of the characters through the realm of theie selves. Hazzard's works have the qualities of cosmopolitan outlook and European sensibility. War also strongly features in her works as a backdrop to the characters's physical and psychological displacement.

In 1960, Hazzard sent a story she had written to The New Yorker. Five more subsequently followed and her first collection of stories, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, was published in 1963. Hazzard's novels include The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), and The Transit of Venus (1981), which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award. She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). She won the 1977 O. Henry Award for her short story "A Long Story Short" published in The New Yorker on July 26, 1976.


 
¡m The Great Fire ¡n

 


Hazzard won the 2003 National Book Award and the 2004 Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire (2003), her first published work of fiction in more than 20 years. This book was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Great Fire is set in post-WWII Asia, where its main character Aldred Leith, a 32-year old English war veteran in 1947, is traveling through China to research a book near Hiroshima. In 1947, Hazzard's father became an Australian Trade Commissioner in Hong Kong. The family spent five weeks at sea on the ship and landed first in Hiroshoma. She witnessed the devastation of the atomic bombs there. The horror of this impression was never to leave her and often creeps into her writing. Between the years 1947-48, she fell in love with an English war veteran who was in his 30s. Her parents may have ended the relationship, but she was to return to this heart-wrenching affair as the basis for her latest novel, The Great Fire. It is a complex love story, set against a background of post-war Diaspora, depicts the political horror and their impact upon humanity (such as the dropping of the bombs upon Nagasaki and Hiroshima ), and the unraveling of the colonial system.

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 Popular fiction clashing with literary fiction: Stephen King vs. Shirley Hazzard


In 2003, Stephen King accepted an honorary National Book Award. But not everyone including Yale professor and critic Harold Bloom and Shirley Hazzard thought him worthy of a prize previously won by Philip Roth and Arthur Miller. The 56-year-old King, whose many best sellers include Carrie and The Shining, called for publishing people to spend more time reading writers of popular fiction like him. King urged the book foundation not to make his award a case of “tokenism.” And King said that he had no patience "for those who make a point of pride in saying they have never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer." Hazzard, who took more than a decade to complete her winning novel, rejected King's notion. “I don't think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction,” she said on stage, later telling The Associated Press that she hasn't had time to get around to one of King's novels, adding that Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad are on her current reading list.

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 Expatriate


Hazzard does not reject her designation as an Australian writer but insists her temperament is not national. She only took out United States citizenship twenty-five years after she began living in New York, on the resignation of Richard Nixon. Eschewing nationalistic identifications, she does not consider herself as an expatriate, and emphasized that “to be at home in more than one place” (Gordan and Pasca). However, her novels are full of displaced Anglos in Hong Kong and Italy, or displaced Australians in London and New York.

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 Current Situation


As an American citizen, Shirley Hazzard now lives in New York and divides her time between New York and Capri, Italy. Hazzard is not a prolific writer, but she is a novelist of style and profundity. It is said that she prefers handwriting to typed input and does not own a television or an answering machine. Perhaps the lack of the expected in her life allows her to view the mundane and ordinary in an astute feeling and render the most powerful and dull, the most beautiful and terrible aspects of humanity. In 2005, Hazzard was awarded the William Dean Howell Medal from the US Academy of Arts and Letters.

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References

“Shirley Hazzard,” in Contemporary Authors Online. (A profile of the author's life and works)  

“Shirley Hazzard,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 289: Australian Writers, 1950-1975. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Selina Samuels. Gale, 2004, pp. 114-120.

 
 
 
 
 

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