In what seems like a cruel twist of fate, it is being reported that the Australian biographer Hazel Rowley (1951-2011) has died on the eve of the tour to promote her new book Franklin & Eleanor – An Extraordinary Marriage.
On my TBR I have Rowley’s award winning Christina Stead: A Biography, which won a New York Times Best Book and Australia’s National Book Award; I plan to read it some time this year.
For a brief biography of this writer’s achievements, see Wikipedia.
I am indebted to Bookseller and Publisher for this sad news.
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
Oh, this is sad … too too young.
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By: whisperinggums on March 2, 2011
at 9:51 pm
I saw the news in the Age a couple of hours ago. Startled, horribly startled.
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By: DKS on March 3, 2011
at 3:53 am
Not fair.
Sometimes fate seems so cruel.
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By: Karen lee Thompson on March 3, 2011
at 6:39 am
It does indeed seem far too young. I had planned to go to one of the promo sessions for her new book.
Her family must be devastated.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 3, 2011
at 5:20 pm
Lisa, feel free to delete this if it looks too much like self-advertising, but I’ve been putting together a collection of obituary links, and if anyone out there has any good ones I’d be happy to add them: http://pykk.blogspot.com/2011/03/must-be-counted.html
I’m leaving out very short articles that don’t do anything except re-report the news from the larger papers, but anything more substantial is welcome.
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By: DKS on March 6, 2011
at 2:55 am
Hi Deane, I think your links post is a very good idea. In the short time I’ve been blogging we’ve lost some of our finest writers, and I like the idea of ‘harvesting’ the obituaries into an online repository so that they are not lost.
Lisa
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By: Lisa Hill on March 6, 2011
at 6:02 am
That’s where fans come into their own. Scratching around for links is a job for a devotee. I wished, a bit, while I was putting that link post together, that Stead had magically hung on and died now, while the internet was around, because a concentrated collection of links for that would have been great. The essays! The memorials! The people trying to be nice after she’d spent years cracking onto their husbands! It would have been so nice.
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By: DKS on March 7, 2011
at 2:27 am
I often think this, Deane, the web is such a great resource for readers!
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By: Lisa Hill on March 7, 2011
at 5:21 pm
[…] Marriage when I saw it at the library because it had received considerable publicity at the time of Rowley’s premature death last year and had received generous reviews. It turned out to be well worth reading, partly because […]
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By: Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage by Hazel Rowley #BookReview | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on January 17, 2018
at 3:11 pm
[…] Marriage when I saw it at the library because it had received considerable publicity at the time of Rowley’s premature death last year and had received generous reviews. It turned out to be well worth reading, partly because […]
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By: Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage by Hazel Rowley | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on November 22, 2018
at 6:18 pm