Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard (born January 30, 1931, Sydney, Australia—died December 12, 2016, New York, New York, U.S.) was an Australian-born American writer whose novels and short stories are acclaimed for both their literary refinement and their emotional complexity.

Hazzard lived in a number of places, among them Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Italy, before taking up residence in New York City at the age of 20. Her first short story, “Woollahra Road,” was published in The New Yorker in 1961 and was included in her first collection, Cliffs of Fall (1963), which won her immediate critical praise. Her first two novels, The Evening of the Holiday (1966) and The Bay of Noon (1970), are elegiac love stories set in Italy (her adopted second home); the latter work was short-listed for the National Book Award for fiction. A collection of character sketches, People in Glass Houses (1967), satirizes the intricate idealistic world of the United Nations, where she worked from 1952 to 1962.

Although Hazzard had long enjoyed critical favour and a modest loyal following, her reputation swelled with the publication of The Transit of Venus (1980), a novel of international scope and rich psychological texture that won the National Book Critics Circle award. The book’s omniscient narrative voice constitutes, by most evaluations, a stylistic tour de force. Hazzard did not publish another novel until 2003, when The Great Fire, set in East Asia in the late 1940s, appeared and won the National Book Award for fiction.

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Hazzard also published several nonfiction volumes, among them Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations (1973) and Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990). Greene on Capri (2000) is a memoir of her friendship with Graham Greene. Her writings on Naples were collected in The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008). Many of her previously published essays appear in We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think (2016).

Hazzard is the author of Encyclopædia Britannica’s article on Naples.