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Helen Garner Helen Garner i(A10495 works by)
Born: Established: 1942 Geelong, Geelong City - Geelong East area, Geelong area, Geelong - Terang - Lake Bolac area, Victoria, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Helen Garner was born in Geelong, Victoria in 1942, and grew up there with five younger siblings. She studied Arts at the University of Melbourne, graduating with Honours in English and French in 1965. She worked as a secondary school teacher until 1972, when she was dismissed, amid controversy, by the Victorian Education Department for answering her students' questions about sex. Obliged by this sudden reversal to write for a living, she has continued ever since to work as a freelance feature writer (and occasional reviewer of film and theatre) for various major Australian newspapers and magazines.

Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), won the National Book Council Award - the first of several awards for her work - and was later adapted for cinema (1982). Her subsequent books include novels (The Children's Bach, 1980; Cosmo Cosmolino,1992), novellas (Honour & Other people's Children, 1980), short stories (Postcards from Surfers, 1985; My Hard Heart: Selected Short Fiction, 1998) and screenplays (The Last Days of Chez Nous and Two Friends 1992). All her fiction is contemporary in setting and in its accounts of the struggle to find decency, love and spiritual meaning in modern urban existence.

In the 1990s Garner investigated a sexual harassment case at Ormond College at Melbourne University. Her book about the case, The First Stone (1995), was a highly controversial and much-discussed best-seller, provoking a spate of conflicting public responses. Her subsequent publication, True Stories (1996), collects her essays and journalism written over 25 years, including the Walkley Award-winning piece Killing Daniel.

In 2001 she published a second non-fiction collection, The Feel of Steel, in which journalistic essays are arranged to constitute personal memoir. For more information and criticism see particularly Kerryn Goldsworthy's book Helen Garner (OUP 1996).

(Biography reviewed and amended slightly by the Author (08/10/2001)).

Exhibitions

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • Voted number 27 in the Booktopia Top 50 Favourite Australian Authors for 2018

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon One Day I'll Remember This : Diaries 1987-1995 Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2020 19599730 2020 single work diary

'Helen Garner’s second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life. Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the bombshell that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.

'With devastating honesty, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another—how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both thrilling and uncompromising. And through it all we see the elevating, and grounding, power of work.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2021 longlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
y separately published work icon Yellow Notebook : Diaries Volume I, 1978-1986 Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2019 17065992 2019 single work diary

'HELEN Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard.

'Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Recorded with frankness, humour and steel-sharp wit, these accounts of everyday life provide an intimate insight into the work of one of Australia’s greatest living writers.

'Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1, in this elegant hardback edition, spans about a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip. It will delight Garner fans and those new to her work alike.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2020 longlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
2020 longlisted Indie Awards Nonfiction
y separately published work icon Everywhere I Look Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2016 9174059 2016 selected work essay

'Every day I work on the edit of my book. I slog away, shifting chunks of material and moving them back, eating my salad in a daze, wondering if the linking passages I’ve written are leading me up a garden path, or are sentimental, or violate some unarticulated moral and technical code I’ve signed up to and feel trapped in or obliged to. The sheer bloody labour of writing. No one but another writer understands it—the heaving about of great boulders into a stable arrangement so that you can bound up them and plant your little flag at the very top.

'Spanning fifteen years of work, Helen Garner’s Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments—sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and laughter. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice. 'Everywhere I Look includes Garner’s famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer. Everywhere I Look glows with insight. It is filled with the wisdom of life. ' (Publication summary)

2018 shortlisted Kibble Literary Awards Nita Kibble Literary Award
2017 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
2017 longlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
2017 winner Indie Awards Nonfiction
Last amended 5 Dec 2019 09:43:30
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