Career
Hazzard is the author of four novels and two collections of short fiction. Her first book, the story collection Cliffs of Fall, was published in 1963. In 1977 her short story "A Long Story Short", originally published in The New Yorker on 26 July 1976, received an O. Henry Award.
The Transit of Venus, her third novel, won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her next novel, The Great Fire, which took her 20 years to complete, garnered the 2003 National Book Award, the 2004 Miles Franklin Award, and the 2005 William Dean Howells Medal. It was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, and named a 2003 Book of the Year by The Economist. Her second novel, The Bay of Noon, was nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize.
In addition to fiction, Hazzard has written two books critical of the United Nations: Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990), and, "Greene on Capri", the latter an account of her friendship with Graham Greene. Her most recent work of nonfiction, The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008) is a collection of writings on Naples, Italy, co-authored by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller.
In 1984 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation invited Hazzard to give the Boyer Lectures, a series of radio talks delivered each year by a prominent Australian. The talks were published the following year under the title Coming of Age in Australia.
In 2012 a conference was held in her honor at the New York Society Library and Columbia University.
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