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  • Published: 3 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780857989819
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $26.00

Second Half First




A stunning memoir from one of Australia's most highly acclaimed writers

A stunning memoir from one of Australia's most highly acclaimed writers

Beginning with the disastrous events of the night before her fortieth birthday, Drusilla Modjeska looks back on the past thirty years. In asking the candid questions that so many of us face – about love and independence, growing older, the bonds of friendship and family – she reassesses the experiences that have shaped her writing, her reading and the way she has lived. The result is a memoir that is at once intellectually provocative and deeply honest; the book that readers of Poppy, The Orchard and Stravinsky’s Lunch have been waiting for.

  • Published: 3 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780857989819
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $26.00

About the author

Drusilla Modjeska

Drusilla Modjeska is one of Australia's most acclaimed writers. She was born in England but lived in Papua before arriving in Australia in 1971. Her books include Exiles at Home; the NSW Premier's Award-winning Poppy; Sisters, which she co-edited; the Nita B. Kibble, NSW Premier's Award and Australian Bookseller's Book of the Year Award-winner The Orchard; Timepieces; and Secrets with Robert Dessaix and Amanda Lohrey. She is also the author of the bestselling Stravinsky's Lunch and her first novel, The Mountain, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Miles Franklin Award, the Western Australia Premier's Award and the Barbara Jefferis Award.

Also by Drusilla Modjeska

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Praise for Second Half First

Thoughtful, absorbing, utterly original; a memoir full of literary doors standing temptingly ajar. I loved it.

Annabel Crabb

Second Half First offers a diaphanous and nuanced vision of the layers of a life, and of life writing. Its magnificent collective portrait reveals Modjeska’s life as part of those it intersects with, including the women writers she lives with and reads ... [a] luminous and captivating work

Felicity Plunkett, Australian

With an amazing lightness of touch, [Modjeska] takes her reader on a journey across continents and centuries, discussing, among other things, lovers, parents, family, friends, literature, visual art, depression, death, and the post-colonial realities of Papua New Guinea ... Second Half First is a deeply crafted narrative, not only in its weave and structure, but also in the ways in which Modjeska invokes the visual arts to articulate her concerns ... Second Half First has a soul. It is both solid and expansive. Modjeska assembles her stanzas masterfully to create a poem of great insight, intelligence, and beauty.

Bernadette Brennan, Australian Book Review

This enthralling memoir ... is a remarkable literary work ... Modjeska’s eloquent reckoning not only of her own history, but of her intellectual life, reaffirm[s] her as a lucid, formidable thinker ... Wise, vital and relayed in Modjeska’s restrained, sophisticated prose, [the book is] a major contribution to a literary lineage traceable to Virginia Woolf, one of Modjeska’s own heroes, herself a constant presence throughout this remarkable book.

Gerard Elsom, Books+Publishing

Second Half First is a beautiful, sometimes profound, and always engaging memoir by a great writer.

Mark Rubbo, Readings Magazine

Second Half First is on my shelf near the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who also wrote despite tragedy and liked travelling in remote, unmapped regions. For this reader, Modjeska's work, with its unanswered questions, is a beacon.

Sydney Morning Herald

Compelling reading

Newtown Review of Books

Modjeska’s memoir Second Half First is warm, intelligent and open-hearted, and provides a rarely captured perspective … Like Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, Modjeska takes the reader to the close grain of an older woman’s life: to friendships that restore perspective on shared experiences … to a vibrant late love affair … Also examined are the complexities of the literary form, including those of the memoir

Brenda Walker, The Monthly

Awards & recognition

Colin Roderick Award

Longlisted  •  2015  •  Colin Roderick Award

ALS Gold Medal Award

Shortlisted  •  2016  •  ALS Gold Medal

Nita B Kibble Literary Awards

Shortlisted  •  2016  •  Kibble Literary Award

Prime Minister's Literary Awards

Shortlisted  •  2016  •  Prime Minister's Literary Awards - Non-fiction

Queensland Literary Awards

Shortlisted  •  2016  •  Queensland Literary Awards - Non-fiction Book Award

Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

Shortlisted  •  2016  •  Victorian Premier's Literary Awards - Prize for Non-Fiction