Janette Turner Hospital

Janette Turner Hospital (born 1942) is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, and academic whose work has developed across Australian, Canadian, and American literary settings. Raised and educated in Queensland, she began teaching in remote Queensland high schools before undertaking postgraduate study in Canada. Her fiction and short stories have been translated into numerous languages, and her papers are held by the State Library of Queensland.

Her first published story appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1978. Her debut novel, The Ivory Swing (1982), draws on a South Indian village where she lived in 1977 and received Canada’s Seal Award. Later novels include The Last Magician, Oyster, Due Preparations for the Plague, and Orpheus Lost. Across this work, she has written fiction shaped by travel, displacement, intimate relationships, and the pressures of public events on private lives.

Turner Hospital has taught at universities in Australia, Canada, England, France, and the United States, including the University of South Carolina, where she became Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita. Her literary career has been recognised with the Patrick White Award and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2003; she also received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Queensland. In 2012 she received the Steele Rudd Award for a short-story collection. University of Queensland Press identifies her as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland.