Shirley Hazzard, the Australian-born author whose 1980 book The Transit of Venus brought her international acclaim, has died at the age of 85.

According to a report in the New York Times, Hazzard’s death at her home in Manhattan followed a struggle with dementia. The news comes in a sad week for the Australian literary world, with the death of writer and broadcaster Anne Deveson on Monday, and her daughter, Georgia Blain, on Friday.

Hazzard’s first book, Cliffs of Fall, was a collection of stories published in 1963, when she was 32. Her first novel, The Evening of the Holiday, was published in 1966, and followed three years later by The Bay of Noon, which was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker prize.



Ten years later she published The Transit of Venus, her breakthrough novel which tracks the lives of two orphaned Australian-born sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, in the postwar world.



The book won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle award. In an essay looking back on it for the Book Critics Circle, Michael Gorra wrote of the placelessness that imbued the work of the transcontinental author.

“[The Transit of Venus’s] social landscape will be familiar to any reader of Lessing or Murdoch or Drabble, and yet it is not an English novel. Hazzard lacks the concern with gentility – for or against – that marks almost all English writers of her generation ... Nor is the book exactly American, despite Hazzard’s long residence in New York. She has more restraint and less bravado than her American peers and she isn’t nearly so ingratiating.”

He continued: “There’s something about Hazzard’s prose, about that eye like an awl and her willingness to reach for grandeur that reminds me of Patrick White; a sense as well of being related to but not quite a part of either Britain or America.”

In an essay for the Sydney Review of Books in 2015, the Australian author Charlotte Wood wrote that The Transit of Venus rewards revisiting: “It is as if the book itself gives off a kind of anti-magnetic field at first, holding the readers off until they are ready to face up to the questions it asks of them ... a significant aspect of her artistic motive is to set up a sense of certainty – and then destroy it, capsizing the reader over and over again.”

Shirley Hazzard speaking at the National Book awards in 2003, after winning the prize for fiction for The Great Fire. Photograph: NK/Keystone USA/Rex Features

It was a more than two-decade gap between The Transit of Venus and Hazzard’s next novel, The Great Fire, which won the 2003 National Book award for fiction and the Australian Miles Franklin prize, and was named 2003 book of the year by the Economist.

At the National Book award ceremony that year, the novelist Stephen King had been somewhat controversially presented the lifetime achievement award, and in his speech spoke out against the literary world for largely ignoring popular US fiction. In her own speech, Hazzard hit back. “I don’t regard literature, which [Stephen King] spoke of perhaps in a slightly pejorative way, I don’t regard it as a competition. It is so vast ... I don’t think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction,” she said.

Hazzard also published five nonfiction books through her career, including two books critical of the United Nations (Defeat of an Ideal, 1973, and Countenance of Truth, 1990), a collection of essays about Italy co-written with her husband Francis Steegmuller (The Ancient Shore, 2008), a collection of the Boyer lectures she gave in 1984 (Coming of Age in Australia), and a memoir detailing her friendship with the author Graham Greene, titled Greene on Capri (2000).

In an interview with the Guardian in 2006, Hazzard spoke of the three men who changed her life in the 1960s: the New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell, who published the first story she ever wrote; Steegmuller, a translator of Flaubert’s letters and biographer of Cocteau and Apollinaire, who she was married to from 1963 until his death in 1994; and Greene.

The two writers met by chance at a cafe in Capri in the 1960s. Hazzard was seated close enough to overhear Greene reciting The Lost Mistress by Robert Browning to a friend. Greene had stalled on the last lines, so Hazzard supplied them on her way out. They were seated together by chance at a restaurant that evening and an enduring, if turbulent, friendship began.

In the same interview, Hazzard expressed her surprise at the frequent comparisons between her work and that of Henry James. “There is this myth that I was formed on Henry James,” she said. “I had hardly read anything of him when I started to write. It must be because I take more trouble, perhaps, with words than authors usually do these days.

“James is a consummate writer, but you do feel it’s like the needle on the old gramophone, that it’s got stuck and you want to move it on. Also, I have to say, I think I’m funnier than Henry James.”

Hazzard was born in Sydney on 30 January 1931 to a Welsh father and Scottish mother who worked for the company building the Sydney Harbour Bridge, where they met. She went to Queenwood School for Girls, but left the country with her family in 1947, moving to Hong Kong, Italy and New Zealand before making a home in New York, where she pursued a career at the United Nations through the 1950s.

Joint managing director of Hazzard’s Australian publisher Hachette, Justin Ractliffe, said the company was “deeply saddened” by the news. “Shirley was a giant talent who produced a small, but perfectly formed, body of work. She continues to be beloved in Australia as well as around the world and will be missed by the many readers moved by her extraordinary writing.”

Hazzard did not remarry after the death of Steegmuller in 1994. The couple had no children.