“For her outstanding contribution to literature, her achievements as a novelist, short fiction writer, dramatist and educator, for nurturing young writers and for instilling a love of literature throughout Australia.

Elizabeth Jolley is acclaimed as one of Australia's leading writers. She has been awarded an Order of Australia, honorary doctorates from Curtin, Queensland and Macquarie Universities, the Gold Medal from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and numerous other literary awards. As a novelist, short story writer and dramatist she has produced an iconoclastic and prodigious body of work. Her passion for writing extends to her teaching and she has fostered writing skills and a love of literature in countless people.

Elizabeth was born and raised in the industrial midlands of England. Her father was English and a teacher by profession. He was a conscientious objector in World War I and converted from Methodism to become a Quaker. Her mother was an impoverished Austrian aristocrat who moved to England and allowed refugees to fill her house before and during World War II. Elizabeth was educated at home by French and Austrian governesses and raised in a German speaking household. When she was eleven she was sent to a Quaker boarding school where community involvement and self-reliance where encouraged.

In 1940, at the age of seventeen, Elizabeth began her training as a nurse at a hospital in the south of England. It was here that she met Leonard Jolley, a kind scholarly man who at the time was a patient at the hospital. After their marriage, the couple spent several years in Edinburgh and Glasgow before coming to Western Australia where Leonard had accepted an offer to establish the library at the University of Western Australia. Elizabeth, Leonard and their three children arrived in Perth in 1959 and it has been Elizabeth's home ever since.

After arriving in Western Australia, Elizabeth held numerous jobs, including door to door sales-person, real estate sales-person, and flying domestic. During this time, while also raising a family, she continued to write. Writing has always been a part of Elizabeth's life and continues to be a passion. She always kept journals and made notes about people and experiences. As a child she retreated into her world of fantasy and imagination and at school wrote letters and stories as a way of overcoming her homesickness. She cannot remember a time in her life when she was not writing.

“Before writing or while I am writing a story I never consider whether it will be published or not, whether it will be saleable or not. I am drawn towards short stories both in reading and in writing and I continued to write them during years when I was not being published. I would have gone on writing even if nothing was published.”

While Elizabeth had a large body of work written before she submitted any for publication, it was several years before her work actually appeared in print. Fremantle Arts Centre Press published her first collection of stories Five Acre Virgin in 1976. Since then she has produced other collections of stories including The Travelling Entertainer and Woman in a Lampshade, a collection of short essays, numerous novels, a novella and a collection of radio plays. Her novels include Palomino, Mr Scobie's Riddle, The Newspaper of Claremont Street, Miss Peabody's Inheritance, Foxybaby, Milk and Honey, The Well, The Sugar Mother, My Father's Moon, Cabin Fever, Diary of a Weekend Farmer, The Orchard Thieves, The Georges' Wife, and Lovesong. Her fiction, poetry and plays have been published in countless journals and anthologies, and broadcast on radio in Australia and Britain.

Elizabeth's work has recurring themes of exile, loneliness, and the struggle for individuals to survive in a hostile environment. Her characters are quirky yet ordinary people living life on the margins of society. They are united by a need to belong and establish meaningful relationships. Her writing has a pulsing comic vein which helps to reveal the darker side of the human psyche. Jolley has won many of Australia's most prestigious literary prizes, including the Age Book of the Year Award in 1989 and 1993, the Miles Franklin Award in 1987 and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award in 1984. The Well, for which she won the Miles Franklin Award, is now an Australian film. Her work is also highly acclaimed overseas, having been published in many countries and translated into many languages.

Elizabeth Jolley taught adult recreational classes in writing for many years at Fremantle Arts Centre, and has lectured in English Literature and Creative Writing at Curtin University since 1978. She firmly believes that teaching helps her with the process of writing. She also taught creative writing in Western Australian prisons in the early 1970s. Her work, now included in high school curricula and university courses, has generated a large and appreciative critical response.

A confident, private person, Elizabeth Jolley explores her subjects with compassion and detachment. She is a quiet, unassuming humanist who is both gentle in her opinions and with the feelings of others. Elizabeth lives in Claremont and divides time between her family, tending to her small orchard in the Darling Range which was devastated in the fires of late 1996 and, of course, writing. She has injected a healthy, fresh spirit into writing and as she continues to work audiences can relish the fine contribution she has made to Australian literature.

Reference; Elizabeth Jolley, "A Child Went Forth", quoted in Sandra McCowan, Reading and Writing Elizabeth Jolley: Contemporary Approaches, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995, p11.