Shirley Hazzard challenged Auden’s line that poetry makes nothing happen. In her case, she said, poetry made everything happen. It was because she learned Italian as a teenager in order to read Leopardi in the original that she was sent, aged twenty-six, by the United Nations, to Italy, where she wrote ‘Harold’, the story about the awkward young poet that was published in the New Yorker in 1960, after which ‘everything changed’.

In Hazzard’s self-mythology, the story about the young poet was the first she submitted to the New Yorker, but, writes Brigitta Olubas, she had sent others to the magazine before which had not been published. Hazzard’s first New Yorker story, appearing in 1961, was in fact ‘Woollahra Road’, which was written in Siena but set in suburban Sydney, where Hazzard was born in 1931. Her relations with her natal land were always ambiguous, and it was in keeping with her reinvention that Hazzard would later root her genius in the Old World rather than the new one.