Olga Masters Biography

Australian writer, born in New South Wales. At the age of 15 she worked on a local newspaper and later edited the Manly Daily. Her journalism has been collected in Olga Masters: Reporting Home (1991). In her late fifties she began writing fiction. The Home Girls (1982), a collection of short stories set in small towns during the Depression, examined the cruelty and loneliness of the domestic environment; Loving Daughters (1984), set in the same period, explored the repressed sexual feelings of two sisters who fall in love with the same young clergyman; A Long Time Dying (1985) is a collection of linked stories about the inhabitants of a small community during the 1930s. Hypocrisy, petty malice, and silent pain are sharply registered in her fiction. Amy's Children (1987) is a novel about an abandoned woman who leaves her three children in order to start a new life. The Rose Fancier (1988) was the collection of stories on which she was working at the time of her death.