Hazzard, Shirley

▪ American author

born Jan. 30, 1931, Sydney, Australia

      Australian-born American writer whose novels and short stories are acclaimed for both their literary refinement and their emotional complexity.

      Hazzard's first collection of short stories, Cliffs of Fall (1963), won her immediate critical praise. Both The Evening of the Holiday (1966) and The Bay of Noon (1970), her first two novels, are elegiac love stories set in Italy (her adopted second home). A collection of character sketches, People in Glass Houses (1967), satirizes the intricate, idealistic world of the United Nations, where she worked from 1952 to 1962. Although Hazzard had long enjoyed critical favour and a modest loyal following, her reputation swelled with the publication of The Transit of Venus (1980), an award-winning novel of international scope and rich psychological texture. The book's omniscient narrative voice constitutes by most evaluations a stylistic tour de force. Hazzard did not publish another novel until 2003, when The Great Fire, set in East Asia in the late 1940s, appeared. She also published nonfiction, notably Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations (1973) and Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990). She is the author of Encyclopædia Britannica's article on Naples, Italy.

* * *