Dorothy Hewett

Dorothy Coade Hewett (21 May 1923 – 25 August 2002) was an Australian playwright, poet and author, and a romantic feminist icon. In writing and in her life, Hewett was an experimenter. As her circumstances and beliefs changed, she progressed through different literary styles: modernism, socialist realism, expressionism and avant garde. She was a member of the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, which informed her work during that period.

In her lifetime she had 22 plays performed, and she published nine collections of poetry, three novels and many other prose works. There have been four anthologies of her poetry. She received many awards and has been frequently included in Australian literature syllabuses at schools and universities. She was regularly interviewed by the media in her later years, and was often embroiled in controversy, even after her death. =

Wild Card: An Autobiography, 1923–1958 (London: Virago Press, 1990)

A Baker's Dozen (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 2001)

Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett, edited by Fiona Morrison (Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2011)