Shirley Hazzard

Hazzard was born in Sydney in 1931 and left Australia as a teenager when her father's diplomatic postings took the family to Hong Kong and then New Zealand, before she settled in New York in her twenties, working for a decade in the United Nations Secretariat, an experience of postwar bureaucracy's small hypocrisies she later mined in satire.

She married the American biographer and Flaubert translator Francis Steegmuller in 1963 and split her adult life between New York and Italy's Capri, publishing sparingly but with exacting care; her 1980 novel The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics Circle Award and remains her most acclaimed work.

The Great Fire (2003) follows a decorated British officer surveying the wreckage of occupied postwar Japan and Hong Kong, whose reserved courtship of a young Australian woman unfolds against Hiroshima's afterimage; it won both the National Book Award and Australia's Miles Franklin Award. Hazzard died in Manhattan in 2016.