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'Across her forty-year writing career, Thea Astley (1925–2004) produced seventeen books, including novels, novellas and short story collections. Early works such as A Descant for Gossips (1960) as well as later ones — It’s Raining in Mango (1987) and Drylands (1999) — have become much-loved Australian classics. Astley was the first writer to win multiple Miles Franklin awards and remains tied with Tim Winton as the only four-time recipients of the prize. As Karen Lamb’s biography — the first book-length treatment of Astley — makes clear, these achievements were no mean feat for a writer struggling to balance the demands of craft with the pressures of motherhood, marriage, work and gendered expectations in a period of shifting social norms.' (Introduction)
