Shirley Hazzard, one of the great English language writers, author of The Great Fire, The Transit of Venus and Greene on Capri, winner of the National Book Award, the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for The Booker and The Women's Prize for Fiction was loved by readers and praised by other writers:

'Hazzard's marvellous, luminous writing I discovered only recently; now I don't know how I ever managed to get along without it' Sarah Waters

`Her writing requires the sort of sustained attention she believed art deserved, but her relationship with her reader is always reciprocal: she doesn't create mystery but reveals its vital place in life -- Lauren Oyler - Harper's Review

`If there has to be one best writer working in English today it's Shirley Hazzard' Richard Ford

` I feel myself go incandescent when I find a writer like Shirley Hazzard who deploys perfect sentences as precisely as weapons. I read swiftly, but I have to let myself slow to a crawl to savor Shirley Hazzard's work. Her prose is too good to do otherwise ' Lauren Groff