Cirrus@Austlit

'Biographers exist in a tight partnership with their chosen subject and there is often during the research and writing an equivalent reflective personal journey for the biographer. This is generally obscured, buried among an overwhelming magnitude of sources while the biographer is simultaneously developing the all-important ‘relationship’ required to sustain the narrative journey ahead. Questions and selections beset the biographer, usually about access to, or veracity of, sources but perhaps there are more personal questions that could be put to the biographer. The many works on the craft of biography or collections about the life-writing journey tell only some of this tale. It is not often enough, however, that we acknowledge how biography can be unusually ‘double-voiced’ in communicating a strong sense of the teller in the tale: the biographer’s own life experience usually does lead them to the biography, but also influences the shaping of the work. These are still ‘tales of craft’ in one sense, but autobiographical reflections in another. Perhaps this very personal insight can only be attempted in the ‘afterlife’ of biography; the quiet moments and years that follow such consuming works. In this article, I reflect on this unusually emotional form of life writing.' (Publication abstract)

'Writing biography is often layered in its telling with long lapses of time between research and writing. Of necessity, the perspectives of the biographer change during that time. This article explores the challenges of writing on a living writer, with or without their approval, then writing on the same author, but after their death. Many relationships are made or re-made in such a process. How is the interpretation of new literary evidence, or the selective decisions made about its inclusion, influenced by a biographer having a kindly ‘keeper’ – a supportive literary estate – rather than a hostile one? This article considers that question. What emerges is the story of how license affects not just access to archival material, or to individuals' key to the story, but how support from a literary estate enables the writing of the biography itself. It offers the biographer special freedoms: the chance to stretch interpretation, to experiment with style, and the opportunity to conjure a subject's personality in full – without risking offence. Most importantly, a ‘kindly keeper’ liberates a biographer in unexpected personal ways, affording the privilege of sharing a family's most intimate dynamics as well as contributing rich nuanced understandings of their own life's challenges.'  (Publication abstract)

'Australian novelist Thea Astley became known for her inclination to stare down the good fortune (four Miles Franklin awards) of her literary success during her lifetime with a persistent and self-generating narrative of having been neglected as a writer. It was never true then, and certainly not now. In fact, from this vantage point, over a decade after her death in 2004, critical attention paid to this gifted novelist has possibly reached a high point.' (Introduction)

'Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather is the long-overdue biography of Australian author Thea Astley (1925–2004). Over a fifty-year writing career, Astley published more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including The Acolyte, The Slow Natives and, finally, Drylands in 1999. She was the first person to win multiple Miles Franklin awards – she won four. With many of her works published internationally, Astley was a trailblazer for women writers. In her personal life, she was renowned for her dry wit, eccentricity and compassion.

'Karen Lamb has drawn on an unparalleled range of interviews and correspondence to create a detailed picture of Thea the woman, as well as Astley the writer. She has sought to understand Astley's private world and how that shaped the distinctive body of work that is Thea Astley's literary legacy.'