18 Facts About Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard was an Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia and held US citizenship.

Shirley Hazzard wrote nonfiction, including two books based on her experiences working at the United Nations Secretariat, which were highly critical of the organisation.

Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney, the younger daughter of a Welsh father and a Scottish mother, both of whom immigrated to Australia in the 1920s and who met while they were working for the firm that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Shirley Hazzard attended Queenwood School for Girls in Mosman, New South Wales, but left in 1947 when her father became a diplomat and was posted to Hong Kong.

Shirley Hazzard's parents had intended for her to study at the university there, but it had been destroyed in the war.

Shirley Hazzard said of her experience of the East that "I began to feel that people could enjoy life, should enjoy life".

Shirley Hazzard wrote her first short story, "Woollahra Road", in 1960 while in Siena, and it was accepted and published by The New Yorker magazine the next year.

Shirley Hazzard resigned from her position at the United Nations and began writing full-time.

Shirley Hazzard's first book, Cliffs of Fall, published in 1963, was a collection of stories that had previously appeared in the magazine.

Shirley Hazzard has the keenest of eyes for the nuances of class.

Shirley Hazzard wrote Greene on Capri, a memoir of her friendship with her husband Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert scholar, and his comrade in literature and travel Graham Greene, whom she met in the 1960s and considered an influence.

Shirley Hazzard's last work of nonfiction, The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, is a collection of writings on Naples co-authored by Steegmuller.

Shirley Hazzard admired the writing of Henry James and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and critics have noted similarities to their work, particularly in the use of dialogue.

Helen and her brother, the dying Benedict, are described as "wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature", and Shirley Hazzard once said that poetry had always been the centre of her life.

Shirley Hazzard was a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the British Royal Society of Literature, as well as an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

In 1963, Shirley Hazzard married the writer Francis Steegmuller, and the couple moved to Europe.

Shirley Hazzard died in New York City on 12 December 2016, aged 85.