It’s the birthday of Australian-American author Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016), known for her beautifully written literary fiction full of portent and disaster, in particular the novels The Transit of Venus (winner of the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Great Fire (winner of the 2003 National Book Award).

Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, and had a troubled childhood; her father drank, her mother was manic depressive, and they ultimately broke up. When Hazzard was a teenager, her father took a job with the Foreign Service and the family moved to Hong Kong, and after that New Zealand, Italy, and finally New York, where Hazzard settled. She never went to college. Hazzard worked for the United Nations for ten years and used the experience to write a collection of satirical linked stories, People in Glass Houses (1967). By then she’d already had her first story published in the New Yorker and had published her first collection, Cliffs of Fall, in 1963, the same year she married author/Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller.

The Transit of Venus is about two sisters orphaned by a shipwreck, the astronomer who loves and pursues one of them for years, and a couple of Deep Dark Secrets. The novel is of international scope and has been called “one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century” as recently as 2016 (Matthew Specktor, “Shirley Hazzard, 1931-2016,” The Paris Review, December 19, 2016), and I think I might go order it now if I can find the other Amazon gift card hanging around on my kitchen counter. (It’s getting to be an expensive week.)

The Great Fire is set in post-WWII occupied Japan, so you *know* it’s going to be cheerful, and indeed it involves one character recording the effects of the bombing of Hiroshima and another character whose beloved brother is slowly dying, and like that.

Hazzard also wrote a couple of nonfiction works harshing on the United Nations, Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-destruction of the United Nations (1973), and Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990). She also wrote a memoir, Greene on Capri (2000), about her friendship with Graham Greene, and a couple of essay collections, including The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008), because she had a thing for Italy. In fact, in its article on Hazzard, britannica.com notes that Hazzard wrote britannica’s article on Naples. For what it’s worth.

Stay warm on this Wednesday of plunging wind chills (as my husband would say, “It’s both degrees out”) and stay scrupulously honest to the data.