'‘My books are all, in their different ways, voyages of discovery. I write books to learn, to stretch my horizons. These voyages of mine are full of risk and passion.’ Hazel Rowley
'Hazel Rowley was an award-winning biographer who was committed to telling the stories of people’s lives. This collection of short pieces—journal articles, essays, talks, diary entries – provides a wonderful insight into her craft. In these pages she talks honestly about the joys, the challenges, the highs and the lows of writing biography. Much of the material is previously unpublished and reveals Rowley’s lively ideas on a range of topics.
'Before her untimely death in 2011, Rowley wrote four acclaimed biographies: about Christina Stead, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. This new collection gives a rich store of reflections on biography and draws the reader into Rowley’s passionate pursuit of stories and her search for new biographical subjects.
'Della and Lynn, along with Hazel’s friend Irene Tomaszewski, established the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship in her memory.' (Publication summary)
'The biographer Hazel Rowley enjoyed the fact that her green card – permitting her to work in America – classified her as an ‘Alien of exceptional ability’. This is close to perfect: her own biography in a few words. If not exactly an alien, she was usefully and often shrewdly awry in a variety of situations: in the academic world of the 1990s, in tense Parisian literary circles, and in the fraught environment of American race relations. It helped that she was Australian, and a relative outsider. The people she sought information from were less likely to categorise her and more inclined to talk. Her books – the major biographies of Christina Stead (1993) and Richard Wright (2001), Tête-à-tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005), and Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage (2010) – are certainly evidence of exceptional ability, as well as obsession and tenacity.' (Introduction)
'Hazel Rowley is the most heroic figure in the history of Australian biography. This woman, who died freakishly of what looked like a chill 10 years ago in New York, turned herself into a biographer of international stature out of a sheer passion to tell the truth about human life as a nonfiction narrative. Her sister, Della Rowley, and a close friend, Lynn Buchanan, have put together a collection of her pieces. They are not chronological; they’re repetitious and follow no set order, but they have a luminous and obsessive power.' (Introduction)
'Hazel Rowley is the most heroic figure in the history of Australian biography. This woman, who died freakishly of what looked like a chill 10 years ago in New York, turned herself into a biographer of international stature out of a sheer passion to tell the truth about human life as a nonfiction narrative. Her sister, Della Rowley, and a close friend, Lynn Buchanan, have put together a collection of her pieces. They are not chronological; they’re repetitious and follow no set order, but they have a luminous and obsessive power.' (Introduction)
'The biographer Hazel Rowley enjoyed the fact that her green card – permitting her to work in America – classified her as an ‘Alien of exceptional ability’. This is close to perfect: her own biography in a few words. If not exactly an alien, she was usefully and often shrewdly awry in a variety of situations: in the academic world of the 1990s, in tense Parisian literary circles, and in the fraught environment of American race relations. It helped that she was Australian, and a relative outsider. The people she sought information from were less likely to categorise her and more inclined to talk. Her books – the major biographies of Christina Stead (1993) and Richard Wright (2001), Tête-à-tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005), and Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage (2010) – are certainly evidence of exceptional ability, as well as obsession and tenacity.' (Introduction)
