'Hazzard was the first Australian writer I read who looked outwards, away from Australia. Her work spoke of places from which I had come and places to which I longed to go... It was reading as an affair of revelations and gifts. It fell like rain, greening my vision of Australian literature as a stony country where I would never feel at home'. In this essay on Shirley Hazzard, Michelle de Kretser offers a masterclass in engaging with a writer's work. She illuminates the precision of Hazzard's electrifying prose, and celebrated the intelligence, wit and fierce humanity of her fiction.