The College of Charleston Visiting Writers' Series and the Friends of the Charleston County Public Library present award-winning novelist Janette Turner Hospital, on Thursday 29 November 2007, Alumni Memorial Hall, (Randolph Hall at the College Cistern) at 7:30 pm. Called by the Times Literary Supplement "one of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today," Turner Hospital, in her new novel Orpheus Lost, has written a love story on a grand scale that spans America, Australia and the Middle East. It is also an exploration of the ghastly side effects of terrorism and of the nightmarish mistakes of war from which the lovers must struggle to extricate themselves.
In the ancient myth, Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue his lover Eurydice from death. In this compelling re-imagining of the Orpheus story, roles are reversed as Leela travels in an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of her lost lover. A mathematical genius, Leela has escaped her demonically religious lowcountry South Carolina upbringing to study in Boston. There she encounters Mishka, a young Australian musician, and they become lovers. Then one day Leela is kidnapped off the street and taken to a secret interrogation center. There has been an explosion in the subway; terrorists are suspected. She is told Mishka may not be all he seems. As she struggles to understand, Mishka disappears, and figures from her own South Carolina past come to haunt and possibly save her.
Janette Turner Hospital, who holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, will read and sign copies of her latest work.
Born in 1942, Janette Turner Hospital grew up on the steamy sub-tropical coast of Australia in the north-eastern state of Queensland. She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States.
Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where it won an 'Atlantic First' citation in 1978. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in l977) won Canada's $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Canada and in 1986 she was listed as by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada's 'Ten Best Young Fiction Writers'. Since then she has won a number of prizes for her seven novels and three short story collections and her work has been published in 12 languages. Three of her short stories appeared in Britain's annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication and one of these, "Unperformed Experiments Have No Results," was selected for The Best of the Best, an anthology of the decade in l995.
The Last Magician, her fifth novel, was listed by Publishers' Weekly as one of the 12 best novels published in 1992 in the USA and was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia's Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada's Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by The Observer, which noted "Oyster is a tour de force… Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English." In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.
Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award in 2003, the Davitt Award from Sisters in Crime for "best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman”, and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award. In 2003, Hospital received the Patrick White Award, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland.
She holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and in 2003 received the Russell Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, conferred by the university for the most significant faculty contribution (research, publication, teaching and service) in a given year.
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