World renowned author to visit Southern Cross University

World renowned Australian-born novelist and academic, Janette Turner Hospital (pictured), will visit Southern Cross University’s Lismore campus for a book reading as part of the Byron Bay Writers Festival.

Staff and students from all campuses as well as members of the public are invited to attend the reading at the Co-Op Bookshop in Goodman Plaza, on Wednesday, August 2, from 3pm to 5pm.

Born in Melbourne in 1942, Janette Turner Hospital grew up and went to school in Brisbane.

She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States.

Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (published when she was 40 and set in the village in South India where she lived in l977), won Canada’s $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Canada and in 1986 she was listed by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada’s Ten Best Young Fiction Writers.

Since then she has won a number of prizes for her seven novels and three short story collections and her work has been published in 12 languages.

Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for the Australian Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada’s Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in ‘Best Books of the Year’ by The Observer which noted ‘Oyster is a tour de force … Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English’. In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times ‘Notable Book of the Year’.

Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award.

In 2003, Hospital received the Patrick White Award for a lifetime of literary achievement, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland.

She now holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.