1. Thea Astley was a prolific writer who was published for over 40 years from 1958.
11 Facts About Thea Astley
1. 2.
Thea Astley tutored at Macquarie University from 1968 to 1980, before retiring to write full-time, at which time she and her husband moved to Kuranda in North Queensland.
3.
Wyndham writes that "in person and in print, the chain-smoking Thea Astley was unsentimental, wickedly funny and yet had a deep kindness and a loathing of injustice towards Aborigines, underdogs and misfits".
4.
Thea Astley died at the John Flynn Hospital on the Gold Coast in 2004.
5.
In 2005, the Thea Astley lecture was instituted at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, with Kate Grenville delivering the inaugural one.
6.
Thea Astley's novels won four Miles Franklin Awards and in 1989 the author won the Patrick White Award for services to Australian literature and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Queensland.
7.
Thea Astley nearly became a journalist, following her father's footsteps, but was refused a position by the Brisbane Telegraph for being too old when she applied after having finished her university degree.
8.
Thea Astley had few female literary contemporaries until the 1980s.
9.
Thea Astley built a reputation as a "metaphoric" writer, resulting in a style that alienated some readers and critics.
10.
Thea Astley found her material in newspaper stories and through her travels, but mostly in the various communities she and her husband lived in.
11.
Thea Astley encouraged many friends and students to pursue careers in writing, and is regularly quoted by other teachers, particularly her advice that writing one page a day "adds up to a book in a year".