Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was born in Australia and lived in Hong Kong, Italy, and New Zealand before coming to the United States at the age of twenty. She was the acclaimed author of four books of nonfiction and six novels, including The Transit of Venus, which won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1980, and The Great Fire, which won the the National Book Award for fiction in 2003.