Cirrus@Austlit

'Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of the acclaimed Australian-born, New York-based author. In the course of the last half century, Hazzard's writing has crossed and re-crossed the terrain of love, war, beauty, politics and ethics.

'Hazzard's oeuvre effortlessly reflects and represents the author's life and times, encapsulating the prominent feelings, anxieties and questions of the second half of the 20th century. It is these qualities, along with Hazzard's lyrical style that place her among the most noteworthy Australian writers of the 20th century.

'Hazzard's work has been duly praised and admired by many including the critic Bryan Appleyard who describes her as 'the greatest living writer on goodness and love'. In 2011, novelist Richard Ford observed: 'If there has to be one best writer working in English today it's Shirley Hazzard.'

'Shirley Hazzard received the US National Book Award in 2003 for The Great Fire, which also won the William Dean Howells Medal in the US and the Miles Franklin Award in Australia. In 1980 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Transit of Venus, and in 1977 the O. Henry Short Story Award, and she has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize. She is 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' (Publication summary)