AustLit logo

AustLit

NLA image of person
Marion Halligan Marion Halligan i(A13513 works by) (a.k.a. Marion Mildred Halligan)
Born: Established: 1940 Newcastle, Newcastle - Hunter Valley area, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

BiographyHistory

Marion Halligan was born and educated in Newcastle. She worked as a school teacher and freelance journalist before publishing her first short stories in the early 1980s. Halligan is a prolific reviewer and short story writer, winning awards in both fields. Her first collection of stories, The Living Hothouse (1988) won a number of awards including the Steele Rudd Award. She published her first novel in 1987 and has published six novels to date (2001). Her most admired work is Lovers' Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel (1992) which won many awards, including the Age Book of the Year Award. Her 1996 novel The Golden Dress was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award.

Many of Halligan's stories and novels are set in Canberra and explore individual lives in the city's academic culture. Lovers' Knots is set in Newcastle and tells the story of one family's growth in a loosely plotted narrative that provides glimpses of the family at various times. Halligan has also written a book about food that won the Prize for Gastronomic Writing in 1991. Her most recent book, The Fog Garden (2001), draws many elements from her own experience of losing her husband to cancer.

Halligan has served as chairperson of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Australian National Word Festival. She has been writer-in-residence at several institutions and has received a number of grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. She has resided in Canberra and writes full-time.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Shooting the Fox Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2011 Z1779676 2011 selected work short story 'Life in all its richness is reflected in this superb new collection from one of Australia's most acclaimed short story writers. Love and loss, sex and death, and the great pleasures of food, wine and reading all populate its pages.

'Shooting the Fox is brimming with surprising characters - the virgin and the pornographer, the adulterer, the translator, the defecting diplomat - and the inconveniences of modernity. In the end, though, it is a collection of stories about happiness, its circuitous routes, its surprising outcomes, and the consequences when we fail in its pursuit.' (From the publisher's website.)
2012 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards Australian Short Story Collection - Steele Rudd Award
y separately published work icon Valley of Grace Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2009 Z1550045 2009 single work novel

'Valley of Grace is an interwoven narrative of modern day Paris.

'Fanny and Gerard fall in love in a way that surprises even them as their lives fill with good sex and loving companionship. But they long for a child to complete their happiness. Two of Fanny's lesbian friends feel similarly driven by the need to have a child. But how to make that possible?

'Jean-Marie is an internationally regarded professor of philosophy whose adoring students are willing sexual partners fulfilling the tenets of his libertarianism. But perhaps philosophy can't bear the weight of human emotion.

'When Gerard buys a beautiful old house in the suburbs, the disturbing contents of the attic binds the stories into an intriguing and darkly disturbing knot. (Publisher's blurb)

2011 longlisted International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
2010 winner Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award
y separately published work icon The Point Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2003 Z1004280 2003 single work novel
2004 winner Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award
2004 shortlisted Commonwealth Writers Prize South East Asia and South Pacific Region Best Book
Last amended 9 Apr 2018 15:36:12
Other mentions of "" in AustLit:
    X