Elizabeth Jolley Author

Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007) was a critically acclaimed, bestselling author in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. The Well won the Miles Franklin Award in 1986. Her friend and colleague at Curtin, writer Philip Salom, describes her work as 'mirth and malice'. In 2005, The Age newspaper wrote 'Elizabeth Jolley has been a gentle giant of the Australian literary world'; Susan Sheridan called her 'one of the great originals of Australian literature'.


Born in England in 1923, she was brought up in a strict, German-speaking household and attended a Quaker boarding school. She became a nurse, married Leonard Jolley and with three children moved to Western Australia in 1959. In 1974 she started teaching creative writing at Fremantle Arts Centre. Although she wrote all her life, it was not until she was in her fifties that her books started to receive the recognition they deserved. She won The Age Book of the Year Award on three separate occasions (for Mr Scobie's Riddle, My Father's Moon and The Georges' Wife) and she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Well, as well as many other awards. Her last two novels published by Penguin were An Accommodating Spouse (1999) and An Innocent Gentleman (2001). Her non-fiction collection, Learning to Dance was published in 2006.