Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene

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.

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.