Expatriates of No Country

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.

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.

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.

Benjamin Taylor, author of Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather:
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.

Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters:
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.

Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age:
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.