Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia on January 30, 1931. She studied at Queenwood College until 1946. Before becoming an author in the early 1960s, she went to work for the British Intelligence, Hong Kong Division, was an employee of the British High Commissioner's Office in Wellington, New Zealand, and a technical assistant to under-developed countries for the United Nations. Her first book, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, was published in 1963. Her other works include The Evening of the Holiday, People in Glass Houses: Portraits from Organization Life, The Bay of Noon, Greene on Capri, Countenance of Truth, and Defeat of an Ideal. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award… for Fiction in 1981 for The Transit of Venus and the 2003 National Book Award for The Great Fire.
Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was born in Australia, and in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994.Ms. Hazzard's novels are The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1981) and The Great Fire (2003). She is also the author of two collections of… short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She lived in New York, with sojourns in Italy.