University residence for American novelist

Writer-in-residence Susanna Moore. Photo by Denise Applewhite
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Some of Susanna Moore's books.
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Wednesday, 20 May 2009

Award-winning American novelist Susanna Moore has been appointed writer-in-residence at the University of Adelaide.

Ms Moore has joined the Creative Writing Program within the University's Discipline of English until August.

Ms Moore is the author of the best-selling erotic thriller In the Cut which was made into a film in 2003, directed by Jane Campion (director of 'The Piano') and starring Meg Ryan. More recent novels are One Last Look, set in 19th century India, and The Big Girls, set in a women's prison. Her work on this latest novel led to her teaching a writing class in a Brooklyn detention centre.

Her first novels were a semi-autobiographical trilogy My Old Sweetheart, The Whiteness of Bones and Sleeping Beauties, all three set in Hawaii where she grew up.

My Old Sweetheart, published in 1983, won the PEN Hemingway Citation and the Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999 Ms Moore was also awarded the Prize for Literary Achievement from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

All of her novels, Ms Moore says, explore the different facets of being a woman.

She has also written a non-fiction book about Hawaii, I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawaii, which interweaves personal memories with tales from Hawaii's history and Polynesian myth. Most recently published is Light Years, a commonplace book about the sea, drawing on her childhood recollections of life in Hawaii.

Susanna Moore has taught creative writing at various institutions over more than 20 years. She has also worked among famous names, at one time reading scripts for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson.

She comes to the University of Adelaide from Princeton University where she has been teaching in the Lewis Centre for the Arts for two years. There she was known as an inspiring teacher who pushed her students to make their fiction real.

At the University of Adelaide she will present masterclasses and mentor creative writing students, as well as start work on a new novel about Daisy Bates CBE. Daisy Bates won acclaim and notoriety for her welfare work, writing and studies with Aborigines in the early 20th century.

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