Janette Turner Hospital

Janette Turner Hospital (née Turner) (born 12 November 1942) is an Australian-born novelist and short story writer. She is also a teacher of literature and creative writing, has often been a writer-in-residence, and is the Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of South Carolina.

Life

Janette Turner was born in Melbourne, Australia to Pentecostal Christian parents. Her family moved to Queensland in 1950. There was no television or radio in the house when she was young, and her family "had a Biblical metaphor for every occasion".Sibree (2007)] She discovered a new world of words and language when she started school.

She studied at the University of Queensland and Kelvin Grove Teachers College, gaining a BA in 1965. She later taught in North Queensland and Brisbane. She married Clifford Hospital, a theologian and scholar, in 1965. The couple moved to Boston, in the United States, in 1967, for her husband to take a Harvard Fellowship. They later moved to Kingston, Ontario, Canada. During these years, she worked as a librarian at Harvard University, and then undertook her Master of Arts in medieval literature at Queen's University in Canada. They also spent a year, 1977/78, in southern India where she wrote her short story "Waiting", which she later expanded in the novel "The Ivory Swing". [ [http://www.alumni.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=18535|University of Queensland Alumni] ] She has said: "My life has been very geographically dislocated, and a way of dealing with that is passion for the physical landscape. But I also think I just learned very quickly to be an acute observer of social and political systems".

In 1999, she was accepted a chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English, University of South Carolina, succeeding Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Dickey.

Hospital has held writer-in-residence positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, the University of Sydney and La Trobe University in Melbourne. She divides her time between Canada, the United States and Queensland.

Writing career

Her first piece of fiction, a short story titled "Waiting", was published in "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1978 and received an 'Atlantic First' citation.

While her novels tend to centre around a central question, her 2007 novel "Orpheus Lost" explores several questions relating including how individuals might react to discovering a terrorist in their family, the balancing individual rights with national security, and individual accountability for government actions.

Hospital describes the driving philosophy behind her novels as follows: "I despair, therefore I insist on hope ... I do believe in redemptive moments I no longer have a safe structure in any traditional sense, but I do believe that redemptive moments exist and that deeply flawed human beings are capable of great and redemptive moments toward other human beings. And that's what I celebrate, For me, that's what the books are about".

Bibliography

Novels

*"The Ivory Swing" (1982)
*"The Tiger in the Tiger Pit" (1983)
*"Borderline" (1985)
*"Charades" (1988)
*"A Very Proper Death as by "Alex Juniper"", (1990)
*"The Last Magician" (1992)
*"Oyster" (1996)
*"Due Preparations for the Plague" (2003)
*"Orpheus Lost" (2007)

hort stories

*"Dislocations" (1986)
*"Isobars" (1990)
*"Collected Stories 1970–1995" (1995)
*"North of Nowhere, South of Loss" (2003)

Awards and Nominations

* 1982 - Seal Award
* 1992 - "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year for "The Last Magician"
* 1998 - "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year for "Oyster"
* 2003 - Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Fiction Book Award for "Due Preparations For The Plague"
* 2003 - Davitt Award for best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman for "Due Preparations For The Plague"
* 2003 - Patrick White Award for literature

Several of her novels have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award: "Charade" in 1989, "The Last Magician" in 1993, and "Oyster" in 1997.

External links

* [http://www.janetteturnerhospital.com/ Home Page]

Notes

References

* [http://203.99.65.121/category/story.cfm?c_id=134&objectid=10455525&pnum=0 Sibree, Bron (2007) "To listen and learn" in "nzherald.co.nz", 2007-08-06] Accessed: 2007-08-28
* [http://www.alumni.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=18535 University of Queensland Alumni]

Persondata
NAME=Hospital, Janette Turner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Contemporary Australian novelist and short story writer
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Contemporary Australian writer and academic
DATE OF BIRTH=1942
PLACE OF BIRTH=Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=