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Marion Halligan Marion Halligan i(A13513 works by) (birth name: Marion Mildred Crothall) (a.k.a. Marion Mildred Halligan)
Born: Established: 16 Apr 1940 Newcastle, Newcastle - Hunter Valley area, New South Wales, ; Died: Ceased: 19 Feb 2024
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Marion Halligan was born and educated in Newcastle. She worked as a school teacher and freelance journalist before publishing her first short stories in the early 1980s. Halligan was a prolific reviewer and short story writer, winning awards in both fields. Her first collection of stories, The Living Hothouse (1988), won a number of awards, including the Steele Rudd Award. She published her first novel in 1987 and has published eleven novels, with her final novel appearing in 2015. Her most admired work is Lovers' Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel (1992), which won many awards, including the Age Book of the Year Award. Her 1996 novel The Golden Dress was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Many of Halligan's stories and novels are set in Canberra and explore individual lives in the city's academic culture. Lovers' Knots is set in Newcastle and tells the story of one family's growth in a loosely plotted narrative that provides glimpses of the family at various times. Halligan also wrote a book about food that won the Prize for Gastronomic Writing in 1991. Her book The Fog Garden (2001) drew many elements from her own experience of losing her husband to cancer. In 2022, she published Words for Lucy, an account of the death of her daughter.

Halligan served as chairperson of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Australian National Word Festival, and was patron of the ACT Writers' Centre (later renamed Marion) for many years. She was writer-in-residence at several institutions and has received a number of grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. She resided in Canberra and wrote full-time.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Words for Lucy : A Story of Love, Loss and the Celebration of Life Port Melbourne : Thames and Hudson , 2022 23611072 2022 single work autobiography

'When your daughter dies, how do you navigate living?

'One morning, Lucy Halligan lay on her bed with her cat and went to sleep. Soon after, her heart stopped. But her mother, writer Marion Halligan, forced hers to keep beating.

'More joy than sorrow, this profoundly moving memoir celebrates Lucy’s life, weaving together everyday details and treasured events.

'Words for Lucy sees Marion at the peak of her writing powers, telling the story of a mother surviving the aftershocks of death and finding the space to live.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2023 highly commended Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award
2022 winner Canberra Critics Circle Awards Writing
y separately published work icon Goodbye Sweetheart Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2015 8361447 2015 single work novel

'A successful lawyer, bon vivant, loving husband and father, has a heart attack and dies while swimming in the local pool. A man apparently happily married, yet, with two divorces behind him and three puzzled children. In death it seems that he is not the person everyone thought.

'As his extended family gathers to mourn, secrets and lies unfold uncomfortably around them. Those pornographic images on his laptop? An unexpected lover - is he still philandering? But somewhere in the turmoil of mourning each of them has to find an answer to the question - who was this man really? What mysteries has he taken to the grave with him?

'Goodbye Sweetheart is a powerful novel of love, the desire for understanding, and the inevitable messiness of life.'

2015 winner Canberra Critics Circle Awards Fiction
y separately published work icon Shooting the Fox Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2011 Z1779676 2011 selected work short story 'Life in all its richness is reflected in this superb new collection from one of Australia's most acclaimed short story writers. Love and loss, sex and death, and the great pleasures of food, wine and reading all populate its pages.

'Shooting the Fox is brimming with surprising characters - the virgin and the pornographer, the adulterer, the translator, the defecting diplomat - and the inconveniences of modernity. In the end, though, it is a collection of stories about happiness, its circuitous routes, its surprising outcomes, and the consequences when we fail in its pursuit.' (From the publisher's website.)
2012 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards University of Southern Queensland Australian Short Story Collection – Steele Rudd Award
Last amended 28 Feb 2024 10:22:48
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