Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist B ...

2004 Miles Franklin Award, the 2005 William Dean Howells Medal for best American novel, the 1981 US National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, and the 1977 O. Henry Short Story Award; she has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the (“Lost”) Man Booker prize. She is a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and has been honoured by the New York Public Library, and the New York Society Library.

Throughout her career, Hazzard has crafted a consistently cosmopolitan perspective, arguing that “my temperament is not a very national one” (Evans), that “it is a privilege—to be at home in more than one place,” and refuting the designation expatriate: “I’m not even sure which country I’d be an expatriate of” (Gordan and Pasca 45). Within this internationalist scope, Australian nationality is conferred by virtue of birth and childhood habitation but also more contingently by way of invitation, courtesy, and the somewhat unpredictable protocols of literary acknowledgment, annotation, and acceptance—as Hazzard noted to an Australian interviewer on the announcement of her Miles Franklin award (for a literary portrayal of “Australian life in any of its phases”): “I thought this was also very generous to include me in that way but, of course, Australia was the first fifteen years of my life and you are already Australian for life by doing that” (O’Brien). Rather than looking to the nation for the explicit context from which her work emerges, in her writings Hazzard directs readers to the broad and cosmopolitan web of humanist inheritance, which she has defined as a fundamental principle of western culture responsible for the creation of its most tangible and enduring products. Her fiction invokes humanism’s principles through the dense morality that underscores its intricate plotting, while its material forms are to be found in her striking use of allusion and the (at times oblique) quotation worked carefully into the voices of characters and narrators alike. These qualities combine to create novels of great stylistic elegance and narrative density through which deeply familiar narratives of love, loss, and aspiration play out.