American novelist returns as writer-in-residence

Creative Writing

Award-winning American novelist Susanna Moore is the new writer-in-residence at the University of Adelaide.

Moore has joined the Creative Writing program within the University's Discipline of English until August where she will present masterclasses and mentor creative writing students.

Moore's 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.

Her credentials as a writer were set when 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 she was also awarded the Prize for Literary Achievement from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her 1995 and most prominent novel, the erotic thriller In the Cut, was made into a film in 2003, directed by Jane Campion. 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 novel led to her teaching a writing class in a Brooklyn detention centre.

All of her novels, Moore said, 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.

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.

What brings her to Adelaide?

"I was in Adelaide 10 years ago to do research for a film that Jane Campion was interested in making about Daisy Bates," Moore said. Daisy Bates CBE was a welfare worker among Aborigines and a somewhat controversial anthropologist in the first half of the 1900s.

"I worked in the library at the University, thanks to the kindness of (Librarian) Ray Choate, who allowed me to examine the papers and boxes left to the library by Bates, boxes filled with the oddest and most mysterious things - ticket stubs and small rocks and a pair of tiny lady's gloves - although sometimes I imagine that I dreamed the boxes into existence.

"After working in the library for a month, I went to Ooldea on the Nullarbor Plain, where Bates lived in a small tent for 15 years. The idea of Daisy Bates - a provocative one - remained in my head all this time. I want to see if I can write a novel about her."

Story by Robyn Mills