The ups, the downs: my life as a biographer

Abstract

Hazel Rowley, brought up in England and Australia, lives in New York City. She moved to Paris to write Tête-à-Tête: the Lives & Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Harper Collins, New York, in 2005. The book has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It was listed among the Washington Post’s Best Books of 2005. In France, the literary magazine Lire named it ’the best literary essay of 2006’. Richard Wright: The Life and Times was written while Rowley was affiliated with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro American Studies at Harvard. Published by Henry Holt in August 2001, the book had cover reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post. Christina Stead: A Biography was published by Heinemann, Australia, in 1993, and has been reissued by Melbourne University Press. It won the 1993 National Book Award for Non-fiction. In the United States, it was a 1994 New York Times Notable Book. Hazel Rowley’s essays have appeared three times in The Best Australian Essays.