At the 2003 USA National Book Awards, the horror writer Stephen King gave an impassioned speech criticizing the assembled great and good of the literary world for its critical neglect of popular writers.
Next up a 72 year old Australian woman took to the stage to receive an award and found herself arguing with King and defending High Art. Today’s episode is about that woman - Shirley Hazzard - and her masterpiece The Transit of Venus. It’s about two Australian sisters as they navigate life and love in Britain, from the austerity years after WW2 to the 1970s.
Shirley Hazzard is something of an outlier in this Classic Australia season. She was not an egalitarian like Miles Franklin and Ruth Park, wanting to knock the stuffing out of the literary Establishment and its cultural subservience to European taste-makers. She adored the European classics and the Old World and happily turned her back on Australia. When an interviewer once asked her to describe the Sydney of her youth, she described it as ‘provincialissimo’, which is pseudo-Italian for the most provincial place on Earth.
In this episode we’re following the transit of Shirley as tracks a fiery course across the literary firmament, from humble beginnings in Sydney to a glamorous jet-setting life in-between New York and the Italian island of Capri.
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