Expatriates of No Country - by Shirley Hazzard & Donald Keene

About the Book

For more than thirty years, the acclaimed novelist Shirley Hazzard and the renowned scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene maintained a remarkable epistolary friendship. Expatriates of No Country presents their correspondence, offering a new and intimate perspective on the work and achievements of these towering figures.

Book Synopsis

For more than thirty years, the acclaimed novelist Shirley Hazzard and the renowned scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene maintained a remarkable epistolary friendship. Brought together by the death of a mutual friend in the late 1970s, they discovered a profound connection built on mutual affinities for literature and culture and common values of humanism and cosmopolitanism.

Expatriates of No Country presents Hazzard and Keene's correspondence, offering readers a new and intimate perspective on the work and achievements of these towering figures. Both left behind their countries of birth, and they shared experiences of displacement, estrangement, and fashioning new lives and selves in adopted homelands. Hazzard, who departed from Australia as a teenager without completing her formal education, led an expatriate life in New York and Italy as she attained literary fame. Keene, a pacifist who served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, devoted himself to the literature and culture of Japan, where he became revered. Their erudite and elegantly written letters trace the larger story of their friendship, finding striking overlaps between their distinctive worlds. Recording a vanished way of literary and intellectual life, Expatriates of No Country casts a new light on two extraordinary people through their unlikely connection.

Review Quotes

But even without the fireworks of love and sex, the relationship between Hazzard and Keene is quietly intense.-- "California Review of Books"

To a considerable extent the pair of them really did live in the world of literature. That's what their letters are full of: books, paintings, opera, poetry.-- "The Hudson Review"

I can affirm that this correspondence brings forward values associated with persons Hazzard would describe as "civilised," using the sense that word acquired in the twentieth century: humane, cultivated, tolerant, well-spoken, well-traveled, and alert to the beauty of unspoiled nature and of elegance in the fine arts.-- "New Criterion"

Whether you're a fan of Keene's translations, anthologies and histories, an aficionado of Hazzard's fiction, or simply someone who enjoys reading about other people's lives, Expatriates of No Country is a book you're sure to enjoy.-- "Tony's Reading List"

This collection of correspondence between the novelist Shirley Hazzard and the scholar and translator Donald Keene is an exercise in high-minded curiosity and sophisticated largesse.-- "Times Literary Supplement"

The extensive, decades-long correspondence between Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene--superbly edited by Brigitta Olubas--opens many doors into the cosmopolitan life, psyche, and literary genius of Shirley Hazzard. Her letters to Donald Keene contain some of her very best prose. Keene's letters in turn are full of erudition and insight. A treasure trove for those who love these two authors.--Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

These letters read like a primer in the art of friendship. For thirty years Hazzard and Keene inspired each other in letters flung like filaments between Tokyo, New York, Naples, Capri, and Rome. Cosmopolitan humanists, they never forgot the monstrosity of war as they shared their devotions to art, literature, and music. A precious testament to the life of the mind and the heart.--Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters

This book is a dual portrait of two supremely cultivated and original people. Olubas beautifully captures the nineteenth-century fullness of the letters exchanged. I found myself swept up by the sheer drama, wondering what these two rare birds would say next.--Benjamin Taylor, author of Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather

About the Author

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was an Australian-born novelist and essayist who spent much of her life in New York City, Capri, and Naples. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Transit of Venus (1980), acclaimed as her masterpiece, and the National Book Award for The Great Fire (2003).

Donald Keene (1922-2019) was Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for more than fifty years. He wrote dozens of books, including the definitive multivolume history of Japanese literature. In 2011, he gave up his U.S. citizenship and became a Japanese citizen.

Brigitta Olubas is professor of English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is the author of Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (2022), as well as the editor of Hazzard's collected stories and selected nonfiction.