Christina Stead

Christina Stead (1902 - 1983) was an Australian novelist and short-story writer noted for her satirical wit and psychological penetration. She was a committed Marxist although never a member of the Communist Party. She lived many years in England and the United States but returned to Australia after she was denied the Britannica-Australia prize on the grounds that she had "ceased to be an Australian".

She wrote 15 novels and several volumes of short stories. She also worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter in the 1940s, contributing to Madame Curie and the John Ford/John Wayne war movie, They Were Expendable[?].

Her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney[?] (1934) told of radicals dockworkers, but she was not a practitioner of social realism[?].

Her best-known novel, The Man Who Loved Children[?] was based on her own life (the title is ironic) and was published in 1940. It was not until the poet Randall Jarrell[?] wrote the introduction for a new American edition in 1965 that the novel achieved its proper fame.

External Link

• A magazine article (http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/13/oct94/brooke.htm) "'A real inferno', the Life of Christina Stead[?]" by Brooke Allen[?] from the New Criterion[?].