Olga Masters

Last updated

Olga Masters
Born(1919-05-28)28 May 1919
Pambula, New South Wales, Australia
Died27 September 1986(1986-09-27) (aged 67)
Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia
Other namesOlga Lawler (Maiden name)
Occupation(s)Novelist, short story writer and journalist
SpouseCharles Masters
Children7, including Roy Masters, Ian Masters, Chris Masters, Sue Masters

Olga Masters née Lawler (28 May 1919 – 27 September 1986) was an Australian writer, journalist, novelist and short story writer. Masters' children went on to be notable figures in journalism, media and film making.

Contents

Early life

Olga Masters was born in Pambula, New South Wales, the second of eight children. [1] Her early life was characterised by the poverty of the depression era, her family moving around the South Coast region in search of work. Masters herself began working as a journalist at the age of 15 on the Cobargo Chronicle, a weekly newspaper serving the south coastal area between Bega and Moruya.

In 1937, at the age of 18 she moved to Sydney, where she worked in office jobs and met Charles Masters, a teacher, whom she married in 1940. With him, she again travelled around country towns, including Grafton, Lismore and Urbenville, before returning to Sydney. [2] [3] [4]

Career

Masters wrote as a journalist for most of her life, and supplemented the family income by writing for local newspapers in the towns she lived in with her husband. On their return to Sydney, she wrote for papers such as The Manly Daily and The Sydney Morning Herald .

While she wanted to write fiction from an early age, she was not published as a writer of fiction until the late 1970s. During this decade she wrote several radio plays, receiving many rejections, but on 29 April 1977, her radio play The Penny Ha-penny Stamp was broadcast. [3] However, with the publication of her short story, Call me Pinkie, in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1978, she moved from writing drama to prose fiction. [3] Between 1979 and 1980, she won nine awards for her short stories. [5] She wrote fiction full-time from 1982, after the publication of The Home Girls. [6]

Due to her late start from age 58 and her relatively early death 11 years later, Masters' published output is small but her impact was disproportionate in that her style and writings about writing inspired many others to take up the craft.[ citation needed ]

In an interview, Masters described her fiction: "All my writing is about human behaviour. There's not much drama, no great happenings in it. No violence. It's about the violence that's inside the human heart, I think, more than anything else". [7] In the same interview she also credits her journalistic career for helping her creative writing: "you would sometimes take quite an ordinary and humble person and write a story about them, and you'd be surprised at the quality that there was in the ordinary human being ... I learned a lot about human nature, and human behaviour, as a journalist ... there is more in life, more in situations, than meets the eye". [8]

Webby, in discussing The Home Girls, states that her writing is not experimental, that its "virtues are the classic ones of tight dramatic structure, strong characterisation and believable dialogue". [9] In listing her books for adults and senior students to read, Shapiro wrote that Masters "has been called one of the best writers of fiction in Australia. Comedies of manners written with sensitivity, wit, and exuberance. Novels about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. A very special novelist who only began writing novels and short stories in her fifties after raising a large family". [10]

Awards

Bibliography

Short stories

Novels

Drama

Family

Olga and Charles had seven children:

Death

Olga Masters died of a brain tumour in Wollongong Hospital in 1986. [1]

Notes

  1. 1 2 Celebrating Bega Valley Women (2005)
  2. ↑ Jones (2005)
  3. 1 2 3 4 Lewis (1991)
  4. ↑ Laurence, Michael (7 October 1986). "Late starter who wrote it her way". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 17. Retrieved 11 May 2021.
  5. ↑ Adelaide (1986) p. 135
  6. ↑ Ellison (1986) p. 228
  7. ↑ Ellison (1986) p. 222
  8. ↑ Ellison (1986) p. 218
  9. ↑ Webby (1973) p. 35
  10. ↑ Shapiro (2002)

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harlan Ellison</span> American writer (1934–2018)

Harlan Jay Ellison was an American writer, known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave speculative fiction and for his outspoken, combative personality. His published works include more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic book scripts, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. Some of his best-known works include the 1967 Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", considered by some to be the single greatest episode of the Star Trek franchise, his A Boy and His Dog cycle, and his short stories "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman". He was also editor and anthologist for Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). Ellison won numerous awards, including multiple Hugos, Nebulas, and Edgars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Munro</span> Canadian short story writer (1931–2024)

Alice Ann Munro was a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short story cycles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Garner</span> Australian author (born 1942)

Helen Garner is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene—it is now widely considered a classic. She has a reputation for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her widespread attention, particularly with her novels Monkey Grip and The Spare Room (2008).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Park</span> New Zealand-born Australian writer (1917–2010)

Rosina Ruth Lucia Park AM was a New Zealand–born Australian author. Her best known works are the novels The Harp in the South (1948) and Playing Beatie Bow (1980), and the children's radio serial The Muddle-Headed Wombat (1951–1970), which also spawned a book series (1962–1982).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thea Astley</span> Australian novelist and short story writer (1925 – 2004)

Thea Beatrice May Astley was an Australian novelist and short story writer. She was a prolific writer who was published for over 40 years from 1958. At the time of her death, she had won more Miles Franklin Awards, Australia's major literary award, than any other writer. As well as being a writer, she taught at all levels of education – primary, secondary and tertiary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Australian literature</span>

Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early Western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies; as such, its recognised literary tradition begins with and is linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, the narrative art of Australian writers has, since 1788, introduced the character of a new continent into literature—exploring such themes as Aboriginality, mateship, egalitarianism, democracy, national identity, migration, Australia's unique location and geography, the complexities of urban living, and "the beauty and the terror" of life in the Australian bush.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geraldine Brooks (writer)</span> Australian-American journalist and novelist (born 1955)

Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Moorhouse</span> Australian writer (1938–2022)

Frank Thomas Moorhouse was an Australian writer who won major national prizes for the short story, the novel, the essay and for script writing. His work has been published in the United Kingdom, France and the United States, and translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian and Swedish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Jolley</span> Australian writer

Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO was an English-born Australian writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s and forged an illustrious literary career there. She was 53 when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels, four short story collections and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kate Grenville</span> Australian author

Catherine Elizabeth Grenville is an Australian author. She has published fifteen books, including fiction, non-fiction, biography, and books about the writing process. In 2001, she won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection, and in 2006 she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Secret River. The Secret River was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jessica Anderson (writer)</span> Australian writer

Jessica Margaret Anderson was an Australian novelist and short story writer. Born in Gayndah, Anderson lived the bulk of her life in Sydney apart from a few years in London. She began her career writing short stories for newspapers and drama scripts for radio, especially adaptations of well-known novels. Embarking on her career as a novelist relatively late in life - her first novel was published when she was 47 - her early novels attracted little attention. She rose to prominence upon the publication of her fourth novel, Tirra Lirra by the River, published in 1978. Although she remains best known for this work, several of her novels have garnered high acclaim, most notably The Impersonators (1980) and Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories (1987), both of which have won awards. She won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice, and has been published in Britain and the United States. Jessica Anderson died at Elizabeth Bay, New South Wales in 2010, following a stroke. She was the mother of Australian screenwriter Laura Jones, her only child.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glenda Adams</span> Australian novelist and short story writer

Glenda Emilie Adams was an Australian novelist and short story writer, probably best known as the winner of the 1987 Miles Franklin Award for Dancing on Coral. She was a teacher of creative writing, and helped develop writing programs.

Marion Mildred Halligan AM was an Australian writer and novelist. She authored twenty-three books, including fiction, short-fiction, and non-fiction. Her novel, Lovers' Knots (1992) won The Age Book of the Year, The ACT Book of the Year and the inaugural Nita B. Kibble Award. The Golden Dress (1998) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, The Dublin IMPAC Award and The Age Book of the Year. Her novels The Point (2003) and Valley of Grace (2009) also won The ACT Book of the Year. Halligan Served as Chairperson of the Literature Board of the Australia Council (1992-95) and the Australian National Word Festival. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM), General Division, in 2006 'for service to Literature as an author, to the promotion of Australian writers and to support for literary events and professional organisations'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marjorie Barnard</span> Australian novelist and short story writer, critic and historian

Marjorie Faith Barnard was an Australian novelist and short story writer, critic, historian and librarian. She went to school and university in Sydney, and then trained as a librarian. She was employed as a librarian for two periods in her life, but her main passion was writing.

Janine Burke is an Australian author, art historian, biographer, novelist and photographer. She also curates exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. She is Honorary Senior Fellow, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She was born in Melbourne in 1952.

M. Barnard Eldershaw was the pseudonym used by the twentieth-century Australian literary collaborators Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956). In a collaboration that lasted two decades from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, they published 5 novels, 3 histories, a radio drama, a collection of short stories, and several collections of critical essays and lectures.

Lydia Joyce Wevers was a New Zealand literary historian, literary critic, editor, and book reviewer. She was an academic at Victoria University of Wellington for many years, including acting as director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies from 2001 to 2017. Her academic research focussed on New Zealand literature and print culture, as well as Australian literature. She wrote three books, Country of Writing: Travel Writing About New Zealand 1809–1900 (2002), On Reading (2004) and Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (2010), and edited a number of anthologies.

Jean Bedford is an English-born Australian writer who is best known for her crime fiction, but who has also written novels and short stories, as well as nonfiction. She is also an editor and journalist, and has taught creative writing in several universities for over 20 years.

Cath Crowley is a young adult fiction author based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been shortlisted and received numerous literary awards including the 2011 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction for her novel Graffiti Moon and, in 2017, the Griffith University Young Adult Book Award at the Queensland Literary Awards for Words in Deep Blue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sylvia Lawson</span> Australian journalist, academic, film critic and author

Sylvia Lawson was a journalist, academic and author, known for her support for cinema in Australia through her work with the Sydney Film Festival from its inception in 1954. She wrote The Archibald Paradox, a study of The Bulletin and its founder, J. F. Archibald.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.