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Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life
The first biography of Shirley Hazzard, the author of The Transit of Venus and a writer of “shocking wisdom” and “intellectual thrill” (The New Yorker).
In Shirley Hazzard: The Writing Life, the extraordinary life of the award-winning writer is captured in full for the first time. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard’s authorized biographer, draws on Hazzard’s fiction—which itself drew on her lived experiences—as well as her extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks, and on memories of her surviving friends and family, to create this vibrant portrait of an exceptional woman.
This biography attends to the distinctive times of Hazzard’s life, from youth and middle age to her long widowhood, dementia, and death, and it traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath it all. Olubas also presents a history of the sites of Hazzard’s life, those described in her characteristic, lyrical evocations of place: her childhood in Depression-era Sydney; her youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; her years in literary New York in the 1950s—at the United Nations and The New Yorker—and her time in postwar Naples and Capri. At last, Hazzard’s life, as seen through her own writing, stories, and archival photographs, is set down on the page, and it completes and deepens our understanding of her fiction.
As Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times: “Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: ‘We are human beings, not rational ones.’” Here, in Shirley Hazzard, is the story of a remarkable human being.
In Shirley Hazzard: The Writing Life, the extraordinary life of the award-winning writer is captured in full for the first time. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard’s authorized biographer, draws on Hazzard’s fiction—which itself drew on her lived experiences—as well as her extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks, and on memories of her surviving friends and family, to create this vibrant portrait of an exceptional woman.
This biography attends to the distinctive times of Hazzard’s life, from youth and middle age to her long widowhood, dementia, and death, and it traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath it all. Olubas also presents a history of the sites of Hazzard’s life, those described in her characteristic, lyrical evocations of place: her childhood in Depression-era Sydney; her youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; her years in literary New York in the 1950s—at the United Nations and The New Yorker—and her time in postwar Naples and Capri. At last, Hazzard’s life, as seen through her own writing, stories, and archival photographs, is set down on the page, and it completes and deepens our understanding of her fiction.
As Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times: “Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: ‘We are human beings, not rational ones.’” Here, in Shirley Hazzard, is the story of a remarkable human being.
561 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2022
49 people are currently reading
1902 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 7, 2023
Having just finished a project where I read Shirley Hazzard's complete work, I was delighted to start on this biography. It was incredible! Brigitta Olubas did a remarkable job at contextualizing Shirley Hazzard, weaving her writing into the work, sharing the history of key figures in her life, and inadvertently helping me curate a massive list of other authors and critics that I want to read after learning about how Shirley and her writer husband knew so many people in the literary world.
Olubas appeared very even-keeled in her portrayal of Shirley Hazzard- impressed by her craft but clear-eyed on her foibles and graces. I learned so much, but recently reading her work helped me stay on top of the references of specific characters, scenes, and locations she included.
Tremendous work!
Olubas appeared very even-keeled in her portrayal of Shirley Hazzard- impressed by her craft but clear-eyed on her foibles and graces. I learned so much, but recently reading her work helped me stay on top of the references of specific characters, scenes, and locations she included.
Tremendous work!
April 28, 2023
Ok, so I’ve never heard of Shirley Hazzard or read anything she’s written; that shouldn’t matter. I’ve read plenty of author/artist biographies where I didn’t know the person in question, and have always enjoyed them because I enjoy seeing how a creative life unfolded. I expected to enjoy this book. WELL. No way would I ever read anything Shirley Hazzard wrote, and also, I don’t think I would have liked her. She sounds like someone who either ticked off or annoyed/bored a lot of people, including her own mother and sister. Her journal excerpts are boring, and her life as described in this book is a long series of “she met this and that famous artistic person, she traveled here and there between Australia and Italy and New York, she wrote books, she wrote terrible things about the UN…” I can tell that the author admired her writing, a lot, but as for me, I know that I would not, so I will not even attempt reading anything she wrote. It was a two-star read but I’m bumping it to three because the last chapter and her contemplation of her impending death was somewhat interesting.
July 18, 2023
A beautiful accomplishment, a good old-fashioned literary biography, right down to the creamy paper pages and the sturdy hardback). Olubas’ writing is a fine match with Hazzard’s graceful, intelligent, cultured style. What a pleasure to read!
June 22, 2023
Good follow up read after reading her novels and short stories.
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November 29, 2022There is a line trotted out every few years or so about Australia lacking great critics. Peddlers of this slack-jawed assertion – and there is no shortage – perhaps fail to account for Shirley Hazzard, whose review of Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm opens wittily, "Great literature is like moral leadership: everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead."
Hazzard lived a full life: childhood in Depression-era Sydney; youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; New York, where she worked at the United Nations and later became a regular contributor to The New Yorker; and her time in Naples and Capri.
Brigitta Olubas's biography, the first of Hazzard, is thus a welcome and overdue intervention.
Olubas writes with style and wit; parentheses are employed to comic effect – and no small amount of savoir faire – when she observes, of a lunch between Hazzard, Edward Hirsch and Michael Collier, "For Shirley, the opportunity to talk about, to recite, poetry with poets was a precious combination (also, to have two younger men to talk to)." Wicked.
Hazzard's relationship with Australia was fractious. As Olubas writes of her last novel, The Great Fire, which won both a National Book Award (leading to a verbal sparring match with Stephen King) and the Miles Franklin: "one of the Miles Franklin judges was concerned that the portrayal of Australians was 'so unflattering that people might criticise the judges for their choice'".
Read on: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-2...
Hazzard lived a full life: childhood in Depression-era Sydney; youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; New York, where she worked at the United Nations and later became a regular contributor to The New Yorker; and her time in Naples and Capri.
Brigitta Olubas's biography, the first of Hazzard, is thus a welcome and overdue intervention.
Olubas writes with style and wit; parentheses are employed to comic effect – and no small amount of savoir faire – when she observes, of a lunch between Hazzard, Edward Hirsch and Michael Collier, "For Shirley, the opportunity to talk about, to recite, poetry with poets was a precious combination (also, to have two younger men to talk to)." Wicked.
Hazzard's relationship with Australia was fractious. As Olubas writes of her last novel, The Great Fire, which won both a National Book Award (leading to a verbal sparring match with Stephen King) and the Miles Franklin: "one of the Miles Franklin judges was concerned that the portrayal of Australians was 'so unflattering that people might criticise the judges for their choice'".
Read on: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-2...
November 28, 2022
I've still never read any of her fiction but this biography was fascinating. What an amazing and erudite life.
July 25, 2022
This is a detailed journey through the life of Shirley Hazzard. Olubas seems to have left no stone unturned in her documenting process. I have to be honest and say that for me, this was rather dry and too much focussed on the mechanics of Hazzard's life. There are a lot of lists of the people she met and the places she went and of course this all informs her writing life and it is to the author's credit that she uses this close reading of a life to show incidents in Hazzard's work which were semi-autobiographical, but it was a very academic style read. And that's great if, for example you are doing academic work on her and want a deep, meticulously researched dive into these correlations. For me, I wanted something else, which is not the fault of the author in any way.
December 31, 2025
Shirley Hazzard is one of my favourite authors, so I was delighted with this Christmas gift from The Offspring: Shirley Hazzard, A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas. But I was a bit put off by some of the judgemental chatter around a subsequent book which Olubas edited with Susan Wyndham: Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters. The publication of this correspondence generated some snippy commentary about how the expatriate Shirley Hazzard took advantage of Elizabeth Harrower when it came to caring for her difficult elderly mother back in Australia... I didn't really want to learn that my hero had feet of clay.
I should have known better. Publicists always like to generate some controversy about a book if they can, and as Olubas shows in this biography, there are also always defensive reactions to expatriate Australian writers. (The Australian reaction to Hazzard's Boyer Lectures is a case in point.)
What I learned from this biography is that there was a lot to like about Shirley Hazzard. She was sociable, making friends from all walks of life wherever she was. She was kind-hearted and generous, and she always remembered the significant life events of the people she knew: who had lost a loved one, who had had a baby, whose book had been published and so on. She brought joy and companionship into people's lives when she hosted parties, bringing people together so that they could talk about the things they loved: poetry, literature and art. She was vivacious and lively, but she was also a devoted wife to her much older husband Francis Steegmuller in his waning years, helping him to publish the last two books he was determined to finish despite his cognitive decline. They read Gibbon's Decline and Fall aloud to each other in his last years, which reminded me of doing something similar with my father, who could still read almost to his last days.
The biography is chronological, beginning with the usual family background, made more interesting than most because her diplomat father Reginald Hazzard took postings around the world. So at a formative age, Shirley Hazzard was seeing a world wider than she'd known in Sydney, and she hated it when they returned home from Hong Kong where at 16 years of age, she had begun working for the British Combined Intelligence Services, and fell in love with Alec. From Sydney the family went to Wellington New Zealand where her father was Australian Trade Commissioner, and where she nursed not only a heart broken by separation but also by the loss of the vibrant, cosmopolitan life of an Asian city.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/12/31/s...
I should have known better. Publicists always like to generate some controversy about a book if they can, and as Olubas shows in this biography, there are also always defensive reactions to expatriate Australian writers. (The Australian reaction to Hazzard's Boyer Lectures is a case in point.)
What I learned from this biography is that there was a lot to like about Shirley Hazzard. She was sociable, making friends from all walks of life wherever she was. She was kind-hearted and generous, and she always remembered the significant life events of the people she knew: who had lost a loved one, who had had a baby, whose book had been published and so on. She brought joy and companionship into people's lives when she hosted parties, bringing people together so that they could talk about the things they loved: poetry, literature and art. She was vivacious and lively, but she was also a devoted wife to her much older husband Francis Steegmuller in his waning years, helping him to publish the last two books he was determined to finish despite his cognitive decline. They read Gibbon's Decline and Fall aloud to each other in his last years, which reminded me of doing something similar with my father, who could still read almost to his last days.
The biography is chronological, beginning with the usual family background, made more interesting than most because her diplomat father Reginald Hazzard took postings around the world. So at a formative age, Shirley Hazzard was seeing a world wider than she'd known in Sydney, and she hated it when they returned home from Hong Kong where at 16 years of age, she had begun working for the British Combined Intelligence Services, and fell in love with Alec. From Sydney the family went to Wellington New Zealand where her father was Australian Trade Commissioner, and where she nursed not only a heart broken by separation but also by the loss of the vibrant, cosmopolitan life of an Asian city.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/12/31/s...
March 18, 2023
A long and detailed biography of a writer whose work is now being newly appreciated. Shirley Hazzard, best known for The Transit of Venus, but author also of other fine novels, and many short stories and essays (particularly on the flaws of the UN) was the winner of many accolades, especially in the USA. She was an Australian who was anti-nationalist and largely critical of her country of birth, and preferred cosmopolitan and literary New York and Capri as her main residences. She and her husband, Francis Steegmuller mixed with a dazzling array of literati, maintaining long-term friendships and gossip and arguments with a who’s who of well-known writers and others in the arts. Hazzard came from a comfortable but not elite background, and did not attend university, but had a self-made extensive knowledge of the classics, languages, and the arts. Olubas’s biography draws on extensive archives of the writer, including diaries and correspondence, and also on interviews with many who knew Hazzard. It builds a subtle picture of this impressive writer, whose fine writing skills and sensibilities were in some respects out of sync with others of the time. Olubas charts her many affairs before she met her husband, frequently drawn to cultured and knowledgeable men, much older than herself, and she traces ways in which these experiences and relationships are drawn on in Hazzard’s fiction writing. Olubas also charts the uneasy and unsympathetic lifelong relationships of Hazzard with her mother, her father and her sister; and her unsentimentality towards some of this. The book is a massive and major achievement (560 pages including notes), but I would have preferred a shorter version. There is a huge amount of micro detail about who was present at various lunches and dinners, and when Olubas introduces Franceis Steegmuller who will be Hazzard’s husband (200 pages in) we are given 40 pages about his life before he became involved with Shirley Hazzard, not only about his previous wife, but about all the people they mixed with too, quoting accounts of cocktail parties, and writings and events. But what does result from this ongoing mass of detail about connections and socializing is a strong sense of the different personalities and the circles they moved in, and also of Hazzard’s central and self-built orientation to have not just ‘a writing life’ but a life in which literature and shared appreciations of it would dominate all else.
March 6, 2024
If there’s such a thing as a biography that’s too thorough yet misses the mark, this is it. Every place and person that Hazzard encounters is given multiple pages of backstory, which is a good idea in theory, but in practice it ends up being distracting. It often feels as if Olubas has more sympathy for other people in Hazzard’s life - her sister, her fiance - while Hazzard is under a microscope. This may be in part because many of Hazzard’s letters have been lost, but even when there is a written record from Hazzard herself, Olubas chooses to use Hazzard’s fictional writing to flesh out our understanding.
Describing Hazzard’s breakup with Tex, Olubas says a scene in one of Hazzard’s short stories echoes her diary entry and then Olubas quotes the fictional work. Why? I have access to Hazzard’s fiction. I want to know what she wrote in a sincere and unguarded moment, in unpolished prose. That’s what a biographer has access to and what I wish Olubas had shared with us. I want to walk 400+ pages in Hazzard’s shoes so I can get to know her. Instead Olubas uses words that create distance, telling us whether Shirley’s descriptions “ring true” and using phrases like “this speaks to” and “this attests to” as if offering literary analysis of Shirley Hazzard herself, not just her books. The overall effect is a rather plodding narrative that left me realizing that until someone else writes a biography of Hazzard, I’ll do better to find her for myself in her essays, fiction and any archives available online.
Describing Hazzard’s breakup with Tex, Olubas says a scene in one of Hazzard’s short stories echoes her diary entry and then Olubas quotes the fictional work. Why? I have access to Hazzard’s fiction. I want to know what she wrote in a sincere and unguarded moment, in unpolished prose. That’s what a biographer has access to and what I wish Olubas had shared with us. I want to walk 400+ pages in Hazzard’s shoes so I can get to know her. Instead Olubas uses words that create distance, telling us whether Shirley’s descriptions “ring true” and using phrases like “this speaks to” and “this attests to” as if offering literary analysis of Shirley Hazzard herself, not just her books. The overall effect is a rather plodding narrative that left me realizing that until someone else writes a biography of Hazzard, I’ll do better to find her for myself in her essays, fiction and any archives available online.
May 12, 2023
This is a very fine biography, intelligent, insightful and meticulously researched, invaluable in illuminating Shirley Hazzard’s life and work. It is also very detailed and sometimes seems little more than a list of people she met, when and where. Certainly keeping up with Hazzard’s wide and diffuse social circle took some effort, an effort that I didn’t feel I really should have had to make. The author goes into quite extensive biographical detail of these people, and although in the case of Hazzard’s husband Francis Steegmuller this is perhaps justified, it often felt unnecessary. No stone has been left uncovered, and I doubt there is more to learn about Hazzard and her writing. Letters, diaries, notebooks, memories of friends and acquaintances, all are mined to provide a complete portrait. Although she tries to make it a fair and balanced portrait, never trying to obscure Hazzard’s faults, it is obvious that Olubas feels a deep connection to her subject, and she is sometimes overly generous in her approach. Shirley Hazzard doesn’t come out too well, however much her work is acclaimed, and I really don’t think I would have liked her, or even wanted to meet her. However, this definitive authorised biography is an excellent one overall – although I admit it hasn’t tempted me to read the novels.
March 22, 2023
This was a fabulously written, well-researched exploration of the writer's life.
I think writing biographies are difficult as you will have so many different kinds of people interested in the work and so many will say there is not enough of one thing. I came to it as a fan of Hazzard's work but also a fan of writer's biographies with no expectations other than that.
I've loved the Dickinson biography My Wars Are Laid Away in Books and the Jackson biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. They're both such excellent reads with strong threads and enough balance of analysis and life story that feels exactly right.
This biography won't land in my top writer biographies, but I don't regret reading it. It's real work to reconstruct a life, and this is one I loved learning about.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.
I think writing biographies are difficult as you will have so many different kinds of people interested in the work and so many will say there is not enough of one thing. I came to it as a fan of Hazzard's work but also a fan of writer's biographies with no expectations other than that.
I've loved the Dickinson biography My Wars Are Laid Away in Books and the Jackson biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. They're both such excellent reads with strong threads and enough balance of analysis and life story that feels exactly right.
This biography won't land in my top writer biographies, but I don't regret reading it. It's real work to reconstruct a life, and this is one I loved learning about.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.
December 21, 2022
Starts out strong then collapses. There is almost no historical context, a lot of name dropping, so many tangents- no themes, no arcs. Reads like an unedited jumble of diaries patched together and called a biography. Could not finish, despite great adoration of Hazzard’s writing.
March 22, 2023
An excellent biography of writer, Shirley Hazzard, which I would recommend particularly to my writer friends. Shirley lived a life steeped in literature and poetry, and moved in circles of thinkers who felt the same. There was a lot of name dropping, but that was just her life. Recommend.
January 29, 2023
This is a fascinating, beautifully written and comprehensive account of Shirley Hazzard's life.
February 7, 2023
Well-researched and well-documented. I had never read anything by Hazzard, but now I will.
April 25, 2023
sublime. extremely iconic of brigitta olubas to have written/published this biography just as i was beginning to discover hazzard’s writing.
August 28, 2023
An exceptional work. A remarkable woman. So much detail and all of it necessary as we seek to build our image of this complex character.
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October 3, 2023It's hard to believe this biography isn't vintage. An instant classic for lovers of Hazzard's work and for those curious about literary lives.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews