Cirrus@Austlit

'A masterful portrait of a major Australian writer, her incandescent poetry and her battles to be heard in a male-dominated literary establishment.

'The first biography of Gwen Harwood (1920-1995), one of Australia's most significant and distinctive poets.

'Harwood is renowned for her brilliance, but loved for her humour, rebellion and mischief. A public figure by the end of her life, she was always deeply protective of her privacy, and even now, some twenty-six years after her death, little is known of the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems. This book follows Harwood from her childhood in 1920s Brisbane to her final years in Hobart in the 1990s. It traces how a lively, sardonic and determined young woman built a career in the conservative 1950s, blasting her way into the patriarchal strongholds of Australian poetry.

'Harwood refused to be bound by convention, 'liberating' herself, to use her word, before women's lib existed. Yet she also struggled for much of her life to combine marriage and motherhood with her creative ambitions. In this sense, she is a twentieth-century everywoman. She is also a unique and powerful presence in Australian literary history, a poet who challenged orthodoxies and spoke in a remarkable range of voices.

'This illuminating, moving biography reveals a deeply passionate figure both at odds with her time and deeply of it, and reclaims and celebrates this important Australian writer.' (Publication summary)

''I need to be a writer,' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.'

'She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans.

'A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer.

'They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation - their 'need' to be a writer - that would not let them rest.

'Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image.' (Publication summary)