Amy witting biography

Amy Witting (26 January 1918 – 18 September 2001) was the pen name of an Australian novelist and poet born Joan Austral Fraser.
Amy Witting, the Australian poet and novelist, who has died aged 83.
She was born in Annandale, an inner-city suburb of Sydney, then a 'tough place' inhabited by many who were hard up.

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AMY WITTING was the pen name of Joan Austral Fraser, born on 26 January 1918 in the inner-Sydney suburb of Annandale. After attending Fort Street Girls’ High School she studied arts at the University of Sydney. She married Les Levick, a teacher, in 1948 and they had a son. Witting spent her working life teaching, but began writing seriously while recovering from tuberculosis in the 1950s. Two stories appeared in the New Yorker in the mid-1960s, leading to The Visit (1977), an acclaimed novel about small-town life in New South Wales. Two years later Witting completed her masterpiece, I for Isobel, which was rejected by publishers troubled by its depiction of a mother tormenting her child. When I for Isobel was eventually published, in 1989, it became a bestseller. Witting was lauded for the power and acuity of her portrait of the artist as a young woman. In 1993 she won the Patrick White Award. Witting published prolifically in her final decade. After two more novels, her Collected Poems appeared in 1998 and her collected stories, Faces and Voices, in 2000. Between these volumes ca

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AustLit

Amy Witting was 71 when her novel I for Isobelwas published and attracted critical attention, and since then most of the backlog of her stories and poetry (written over a lifetime) have been published. She is now known to a wide readership for the quality and sophistication of her work. She was born in Annandale, an inner-city suburb of Sydney, then a 'tough place' inhabited by many who were hard up. Witting claims that this environment at least provided her with an inexhaustible subject, survival, that recurs throughout her work.

Joan Fraser, as she was then, attended the local Catholic school, St Brendan's, from 1923 to 1929. Family circumstances were difficult and she was under pressure at home and at school; she was also often ill with what was eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis (TB). Like her character Isobel, Joan was an avid reader and retreated from reality into a rich inner world. Her secondary schooling was at Fort Street Girls High from 1930 to 1934. Joan Fraser, aged 16, had a poem, 'Wanderers', published in the Sydney Morning Herald, under the pseudony

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Amy Witting

Australian novelist and poet

Amy Witting
Born	Joan Austral Fraser (1918-01-26)26 January 1918 Sydney, Australia
Died	18 September 2001(2001-09-18) (aged 83) Sydney, Australia
Other names	De Guesclin, Joan Austral Levick
Occupation(s)	Novelist, poet and teacher
Spouse	Les Levick
Children	1
Website	Amy Witting website

Amy Witting (26 January 1918 – 18 September 2001) was the pen name of an Australian novelist and poet born Joan Austral Fraser.^[1] She was widely acknowledged as one of Australia's "finest fiction writers, whose work was full of the atmosphere and colour or times past".^[2]

Life

Amy Witting was born in the Sydney suburb of Annandale, and was brought up as a Catholic. She has "melancholy memories of a repressive family life" and remembered the nuns at her school, St Brendan's College, as being "obsessed with the torments of hell".^[3] She suffered from tuberculosis as a child.^[4]

She went to Fort Street Girls' High School. She studied languages at th