Elizabeth Harrower is the author of the novels Down in the City, The Long Prospect, The Catherine Wheel and The Watch Tower—all of which have been republished as Text Classics—and In Certain Circles, which was published in 2014 and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2015. She died in July 2020.
‘When Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower came ‘roaring out of forty years in obscurity’, as Helen Garner put it in the Australian’s 2012 round-up of best books, we didn’t know that we’d go on to republish all of Elizabeth’s work.’ Read this feature on the Text blog by senior editor David Winter.
‘Harrower’s writing is witty, desolate, truth-seeking, and complexly polished. Everything (except feeling, which is passionately and directly confessed) is controlled and put under precise formal pressure. Her sentences, which have an unsettling candor, launch a curling assault on the reader, often twisting in unexpected ways…Harrower is an exceptionally subtle psychologist…[Her] five novels have an almost relentless thematic consistency and a strikingly similar darkness of vision.’ James Wood, New Yorker
‘Contemporary thoughts on Elizabeth Harrower’ by Whispering Gums.
INTERVIEWS
Australian: Elizabeth Harrower: nearly 90 and still dangerous ($)
The Watch Tower
Elizabeth Harrower Text Classics Set
Down in the City
In Certain Circles
The Long Prospect
The Watch Tower
The Catherine Wheel
A Few Days in the Country
