HOSTAGES: Stories by Fay Zwicky (Signed)

First Edition. Signed by Author. pp. 91 #0117 Zwicky’s first collection of poems, Isaac Babel’s Fiddle, was published in 1975. She has since published another seven collections, mostly since her retirement from the university. Her second collection, Kaddish and other poems (1982), won the New South Wales Premier’s Poetry Award for that year. Its title poem, a lament on the death of her father, is also a vivid evocation of the life of an Australian Jewish family. Zwicky also writes tellingly about the patriarchal silencing of the voices and experiences of women, as in the very funny ‘Mrs Noah Speaks’, part of the poetic sequence ‘Ark Voices’ from the same collection. Two of her later collections, Ask Me (1990) and The Gatekeeper’s Wife (1997) received the Western Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Many of her more recent poems have focused on such contemporary cultural and political concerns as the uses and abuses of power, the problems of refugees and violence, as well as continuing her probing of family and autobiographical themes.

Zwicky has also written short stories, collected in Hostages (1983), criticism and reviews, as well as editing anthologies. A collection of her essays, The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival 1974-1984 (1986), won the Non-Fiction Award in the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. In 2005 she won both the Patrick White Award and the FAW Christopher Brennan Award. In 2004 she was declared one of the Western Australian State’s Living Treasures.