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Shirley Hazzard

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Author of fiction and non-fiction. Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard eventually became a dual citizen of Great Britain and the United States.

As a child, she traveled the world due to her parents’ diplomatic postings and, at 16, worked for British Intelligence in Hong Kong, monitoring the civil war in China. After this, she lived in New Zealand, Europe, the United States, and Italy. In the USA, she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York.

After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of her book Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations (1973). She has also written non-fiction books Countenance of Truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990) about the Kurt Waldheim case and Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000) about her friend, Graham Greene. In 1985, Coming of Age in Australia was published, a collection of her Australian Broadcasting Corporation Boyer lectures.

Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels: The Evening of the Holiday (1966); People in Glass Houses (1967); The Bay of Noon (1970); The Transit of Venus (1980); and The Great Fire (2003). This book was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Best author’s book

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4.2

The Transit of Venus

Sam Altman
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