RUTH Park, the author of classic Australian books such as The Harp in the South and The Muddleheaded Wombat, has died in Sydney aged 93.

Park's career as a novelist was launched when she won the inaugural Sydney Morning Herald literary competition in 1946 for her unpublished first novel The Harp in the South. Announced in The Herald under the headline ''Woman wins £2000 novel prize'', the news caused a scandal among readers shocked by the story of an Irish family set in the slums of Surry Hills amid poverty, adolescent sex, wife-beating and murder.

Author Ruth Park worked commonly in the kitchen with her typewriter on an ironing board.

Although the public did not want to believe it, the setting was realistic, based on Park's observations while living above a shop in Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, with her husband, D'Arcy Niland.

Born in New Zealand in 1917, Park moved to Sydney in 1942 to take a newspaper job and to marry Niland, a fellow journalist and later author of The Shiralee. They raised five children while struggling to live as freelance writers.