Chair: Richard Buckham

“The world likes to trace the author’s life in the novel but the obvious isn’t always true. Something that was very close to you and resembles your experience isn’t necessarily the deepest version of the story… One feels for another person. One observes. One imagines.“ Literary biography is either portrait or autopsy according to one of the masters of the genre, Dame Hermione Lee. In Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, Brigitta Olubas is both coroner and portraitist. Meet the biographer as she reflects on Hazzard’s own sense of her life’s work, which included four novels, two short story collections, a peripatetic life, great friendships with other writers and a long marriage to an aesthete 25 years her senior.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 9:30am on the North Stage