Elizabeth Jolley

Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO was an English-born writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s. 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. Her novels explore "alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment." Jolley was born in Birmingham, England as... Monica Elizabeth Knight, to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a general. She grew up in the Black Country in the English industrial Midlands. She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent to Sibford School, a Quaker boarding school. During the 1930s, as war loomed, her family's home was full of refugees from Europe, creating, she later said, "a mysterious world for us children". At 17 she began training as nurse in London and was exposed firsthand to the horrors of World War II.
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