Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard is one of Australia's most significant expatriate authors, and a major international literary figure by any measure. Her work has been extensively and extravagantly praised by writers and reviewers, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford: 'If there has to be one best writer working in English today it's Shirley Hazzard.' Similarly, novelist Michael Cunningham: 'One of the greatest writers working in English today, and London Times critic Brian Appleyard 'For me, the greatest living writer on goodness and love'.

She has received major literary awards including the 2003 US National Book Award, the 2004 Miles Franklin Award, the 2005 William Dean Howells Medal for best American novel, the 1981 US National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, the 1977 O. Henry Short Story Award; and 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.

Despite the critical acclaim for Hazzard's work, there has not yet been a full critical study, and only a handful of scholarly articles have been published since the early 1990s. This scholarly neglect is in part a consequence of Hazzard's complicated location outside the limits of national literary canons.
In particular, Hazzard's highly significant writing about the United Nations has never before been considered by critics, and it is not widely known today that she was the first writer to publish an account of the US State Department McCarthyist involvement in UN hiring of staff from its earliest years, and the first person to air claims that UN Secretary-general Kurt Waldheim had concealed details of his World War II activities. This public writing stands in a fascinating relation to her highly wrought literary fiction, presenting particular challenges to her critics and readers.

This study brings together Hazzard's highly regarded literary fiction and her impassioned, polemical critiques of the United Nations through the rubrics of her humanist thought and her deep commitment to internationalist, cosmopolitan principles.This is an important book for all literature, Australian literature, women writers and contemporary fiction collections.