From the Melbourne Age :
"I lead a very reclusive life ... and suddenly this happens." Fay Zwicky
By Jane Sullivan
November 12, 2005
WHEN poet Fay Zwicky had a telephone call to tell her she'd won one of Australia's top literary prizes, she thought it was a hoax. "I was completely bowled over," she said. "I lead a very reclusive life and I never expect anything. I always think I'm drifting along and nobody knows I'm here, and it's great. And suddenly this happens."
The 72-year-old Perth writer, who was born and brought up in Melbourne and has been writing poetry and prose for half a century, has won the $25,000 Patrick White Award.
The annual prize is given to an Australian writer whose work, in the opinion of the award committee, has not received adequate recognition. The committee says Zwicky is "one of Australia's most original and accomplished poets".
Patrick White founded the award after he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1973. Zwicky remembers meeting him at an anti-nuclear symposium in Canberra in the 1980s, where she read one of her stories. "He was very elderly and infirm and I was totally in awe of the man. Shrunken and ill as he was, he took the trouble to come over and say something very nice about my story. I was so moved I burst into tears," she said.
"I know he had a reputation as a bit of a curmudgeon, but then so have I. He was a remarkable humanitarian. I have enormous respect for him and I'm terribly moved I should be part of the legacy."
Zwicky began writing poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne in the 1950s and has worked as a concert pianist and an academic. As a young musician, she always had a book behind the music stand so her mother could not see what she was reading.
Her poetry collections have won several awards. One of her most-admired poems, Kaddish, is an elegy for her father that also draws on her experience of growing up in Melbourne's Jewish community.
Today she lives with "the usual old-age things: your mind might be leaping about, but the body ain't following", but she is still writing poetry. Next year, Giramondo Press will publish a new collection, Picnic. "It will probably be my last book but I'm very pleased, I've been working quite hard. My poems are getting a bit engrossed by the political state of things at the moment … leaning towards a study of despotism, the waste of life and the need for survival."
Last year, Western Australia declared her a Living Treasure — "a most repulsive term".
She finds poetry today "a mixed bag" and is not keen on some performance poetry with "people practically masturbating on stage. I'm afraid I'm old-fashioned Melbourne: don't show everything, keep it in. I was brought up in a puritanical style and I'm not sorry about that."
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