Cirrus@Austlit

Olga Masters was born at Pambula, New South Wales, daughter of Joseph and Dorcas Lawler. She grew up during the 1930s depression and worked as a journalist with the Cobargo Chronicle from the age of fifteen. In 1937 she moved to Sydney, worked as a shorthand typist and writer of advertising copy for radio, and married Charles Masters, a schoolteacher, in 1940. The next twenty years were spent in New South Wales country towns raising seven children. Masters resumed her career as a journalist in 1955 when her youngest child was fourteen. She wrote mainly for the women's pages of country and suburban newspapers which she described as a long apprencticeship for her career as a fiction writer.

As a journalist, Masters mainly wrote human interest features; her fiction is in the same vein, frequently revolving around the lives and relationships of ordinary rural folk, particularly women. Masters attracted immediate attention from the beginning of her literary career in 1975 with several prizes for her short stories. In 1977 she withdrew from journalism to devote herself fulltime to writing fiction. Her first collection of stories, Home Girls (1982), and her first novel, Loving Daughters (1984), both attracted commendations. Then, during the 1980s, she published another collection and two novels, becoming a widely-admired participant at writers' festivals and other literary occasions.

Masters' fiction draws heavily on her experience of rural poverty, exploring familial and small-town relationships with a spare yet powerful prose style. Her examinations of young women attempting to achieve autonomy in such a setting are widely admired. Her politics were Labor and her religion Church of England. In 1984-1985 she gave readings and writing workshops for the National Book Council of Australia. In 1985 Masters was an exchange writer of the Australia Council Literature Board in the U.S.S.R.along with the writers Tom Shapcott and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.She also spent six weeks as a writer in residence at the Fremantle Arts Centre.

In the four busy years after the publication of her first book in 1982, Masters wrote four more. In 1985 she and her husband settled in Austinmer. Despite worries about her husband's health, despite tragedy in the family and despite the dreadful headaches that were the precursor to the brain tumour that eventually killed her, she continued writing - both fiction and journalism. Masters died in 1986. Selections of her journalism, unpublished stories and a play were published posthumously.