Marion Halligan

Marion Mildred Halligan AM (born 16 April 1940) is an Australian writer and novelist. She was born and educated in Newcastle, New South Wales, and worked as a school teacher and journalist before publishing her first short stories. Halligan has served as chairperson of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Australian National Word Festival. She currently lives in Canberra.

For a number of years she was a member of a group of women writers based in Canberra known as the "Canberra Seven" or "Seven Writers". The group began with three members in 1980, growing to seven by 1984. In addition to Marion Halligan, they were Dorothy Johnston, Margaret Barbalet, Sara Dowse, Suzanne Edgar, Marian Eldridge and Dorothy Horsfield. The group essentially disbanded after Marian Eldridge's death in 1997. However, before that they met regularly to critique each other's work, and published a book of short stories called Canberra Tales in 1988.^[1]

She was made a Member in the Order of Australia (AM), General Division, in 2006 for services to literature and for her work in promoting Australian literature.^[2]

Awards

• 1990 — Pascall Prize winner for Eat My Words^[3]
• 1990 — NBC Banjo Award shortlisted for The Spider Cup
• 1992 — The Age Book of the Year Imaginative Writing Prize 1992 winner for Lovers' Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel
• 1992 — The Age Book of the Year Book of the Year 1992 joint winner for Lovers' Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel
• 1993 — NBC Banjo Award shortlisted for Lovers' Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel
• 1994 — Nita Kibble Literary Award winner for Lovers' Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel
• 1994 — ACT Book of the Year joint winner for Lovers' Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel^[4]
• 1998 — The Age Book of the Year Fiction Prize shortlisted for The Golden Dress
• 1999 — The Miles Franklin Award shortlisted for The Golden Dress
• 2002 — Nita Kibble Literary Award shortlisted for The Fog Garden
• 2004 — Commonwealth Writers' Prize South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best Book shortlisted for The Point
• 2004 — ACT Book of the Year winner for The Point

Bibliography

Novels

• Self Possession (1987)
• Spider Cup (1990)
• Lovers' Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel (1992)
• Wishbone (1994)
• The Golden Dress (1998)
• The Fog Garden (2001)
• The Point (2003)
• The Apricot Colonel (2006)
• Murder on the Apricot Coast (2008)
• Valley of Grace (2009)
• Goodbye Sweetheart (2015)

Short story collections

• The Living Hothouse (1988)
• The Hanged Man in the Garden (1989)
• The Worry Box (1993)
• Collected Stories (1997)

Non-fiction

• Eat My Words (1990)
• Out of the Picture (1996) - collection
• Cockles of the Heart (1996) - travel
• Those Women Who Go To Hotels (1997) - autobiography, travel
• The Taste of Memory (2004)

Edited

• The Gift of Story: Three Decades of UQP Short Stories (1998)
• Storykeepers (2001)

Children's

• The Midwife's Daughters (1997)

References