The Transit of Venus:

Born on January 30, 1931, in Sydney, Australia, Shirley Hazzard studied at Queenwood College until 1946. After leaving Queenwood, Hazzard went to work for the British Intelligence, Hong Kong Division. Also an employee of the British High Commissioner's Office in Wellington, New Zealand, and a technical assistant to under-developed countries for the United Nations, Hazzard started to write for a living in the early 1960s. Hazzard's first work as an author, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, was published by Knopf in 1963. Among some of Hazzard's other works are The Evening of the Holiday, People in Glass Houses: Portraits from Organization Life, The Bay of Noon, and History Countenance of Truth. In her novel The Transit of Venus, Hazzard tells the story of two Australian-born orphaned sisters who make their way to England for a better life. A Guggenheim fellow in 1974 and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1981, Hazzard has lived in Australia, New Zealand, the Far East, The United States, and Italy.