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Brigitta Olubas Brigitta Olubas i(A35058 works by)
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Brigitta Olubas is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales (2009). She has published widely in the area of contemporary Australian literary and visual culture. She has written about the work of Shirley Hazzard and Patrick White.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2019 shortlisted Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship

for a biography of writer Shirley Hazzard

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Shirley Hazzard : A Writing Life New York (City) : Farrar Straus and Giroux , 2022 25261970 2022 single work biography

'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).

'Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life tells the extraordinary story of a great modern novelist. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard's authorized biographer, has drawn, with great subtlety and understanding, on her fiction (itself largely based on Hazzard's own experience); on an extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks; and on the memories of surviving friends and colleagues to create this resonant portrait of an exceptional woman.

'This biography explores the distinctive times of Hazzard's life, from her youth and middle age to her widowhood and years of decline, and traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath Hazzard's formidable, beguiling presence. Olubas shows us the places of Hazzard's life, of which she wrote with characteristic lyricism: her childhood in Depression-era Sydney; her youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; her years in New York in the 1950s, working at the United Nations and The New Yorker. Olubas also describes Hazzard's long marriage to the writer Francis Steegmuller and their deep involvement in postwar Naples and Capri. Rare photographs from Hazzard's collection and elsewhere accompany the text.

'Hazzard was the last of a generation of selftaught writers, devotees of a great literary tradition, and her depth of perception and expressive gifts have earned her iconic status. Brigitta Olubas has brought her brilliantly alive, enhancing and deepening our understanding of the singular woman who created some of the most enduring fiction of the past sixty years.

'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.'  (Publication summary)

2023 winner 'The Nib': CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature The Alex Buzo Shortlist Prize
2023 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Non-Fiction
2023 shortlisted Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature
Last amended 21 Jan 2019 16:21:33
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