Keeping the Past Aflame: A Profile of Shirley Hazzard

by
Lucy Gordan
From the January/February 2004 issue of
Poets & Writers Magazine
11.30.07

Fifty years ago Shirley Hazzard's parents ended her love affair with a young army officer, a "walking anthology of poetry," by moving their family from Nanking to New Zealand. The National Book Award–winning novelist famously went on to marry the renowned Francis Steegmuller, but she knew one day she would return to her first love. Indeed, she did, in the recently published The Great Fire.