'British-born Margaret Scott received the Australia Council’s Writers' Emeritus Award in April 2005. A few months later, when she died at the age of seventy-one, Australia lost a literary treasure and a great friend; her loss was deeply felt not only in literary circles but in many other spheres beyond her home in Tasmania. Although interest in her work had been growing at the time of her death, her prose, especially her two novels, has been under-acknowledged since. With her poetry, it forms an illustrious body of work. Changing Countries, Bridging Worlds focuses on the transition Scott made in emigrating from England to Tasmania and traces how the strangeness and displacement she felt on arrival was transformed into acceptance and affection. Scott's poetry, novels and essays illuminate the various difficulties and rewards inherent in changing countries. She bridges geographical and temporal worlds, linking Victorian and contemporary England with early colonial and contemporary Australia. In Scott's work, the real and remembered worlds are fused and imaginatively transformed through art: she recreates historical and personal past and present, and through poetry and prose explores eternal questions relating to 'truth', memory, imagination, fact and fiction. Her writing is complex, layered, thought-provoking. Janet Upcher provides a perceptive view of how, by physically changing countries, Margaret Scott imaginatively changed the literary landscape of her adopted country, Australia.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
