Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley

Although she started writing early in life, it was not until her fifties that Elizabeth Jolley received the recognition her talent deserved. She won The Age Book of the Year Award on three occasions as well as the Miles Franklin Award. She has won the Western Australian Premier's Prize for both fiction and non-fiction. She wrote about hope and love in families, schools, hospitals, nursing homes and boarding houses in which unlovely and loveless people survive as best they can. Jolley too was a survivor. Her lovelorn and homeless times in Britain and her life as a migrant in Australia inform her own experiences of 'doing life'. The array of wild characters in her fiction - misfits and those on the edge of society - can also be found in her remarkable life. Brian Dibble was given complete access to the writer's private papers and has spent more than a decade travelling the world to write this lyrical and readable biography.