Hazzard has never read very much like her contemporaries.
And this has been observed by readers throughout her career. This also might be part of its current appeal, the fact that her writing is not really datable, or that it seems to come to us from quite a different time from whenever “now” is. Hazzard’s career was a long one, but with those long gaps as well her work is not easily aligned to a particular period. Both those publications were long awaited, and the publicity and reviews of both made a lot of that, so in both instances there were new generations of readers discovering a “new” writer. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was published twenty-three years after The Transit of Venus, and there had been a ten-year gap between that and the novel before. What’s interesting in Shirley Hazzard’s case is that it has happened to her before. Writers’ deaths allow, or prompt, readers and publishers to mark their achievement, to return to their work and reconsider it, and, of course, to republish it. Not long before her death, her Selected Essays were published, and this also brought new readers to her work. Harvard Review: Shirley Hazzard seems to be “having a moment.” To what do you attribute the resurgence of interest in her work?īrigitta Olubas: I think much of the current interest stems from her recent death, in December 2016, which has led to wonderful tributes like Michelle de Kretser’s On Shirley Hazzard, as well as to the Collected Stories (and a biography, which is in progress). In this conversation with Harvard Review, Brigitta Olubas, professor of English at the University of New South Wales and the editor of Hazzard’s Collected Stories, sits down with Harvard Review to talk about Hazzard’s career, style, repeated “rediscovery” (she’s never really gone away), and those impeccably crafted sentences. Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) wrote nonfiction, short stories, and several novels, including The Great Fire, winner of the National Book Award.
Out of Step with the Modern World: The Making of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories
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