Simone Lazaroo
Simone Lazaroo was born in Singapore, and migrated with her family to Western Australia in 1963. She lectures in Creative Writing at Murdoch University in Perth.
Simone is the author of two award-winning novels: The World Waiting to be Made and The Australian Fiance. Her prizes include the T.A.G Hungerford Award, the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Fiction and a shortlisting in the Kirriyama Rim Pacific Prize in 2000 with Carlos Fuentes and Michael Ondaatje. Her short stories have been anthologised in England and Australia. Simone was a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2004.
Simone’s new novel, Sustenance, has just been released by UWA Press.
She lives in Fremantle, WA.
Books by Simone Lazaroo
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The World Waiting to be Made
A young woman travels back to her birthplace, Singapore, and to Malacca, her ancestral home, to discover rich, complex and mysterious aspects of her own identity.
Winner TAG Hungerford Award
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Winner Western Australian Premier’s Award - Fiction 1995
Shortlisted for the Nita B Kibble Award -
The Australian Fiance
Singapore, 1949. A young Eurasian woman, a survivor of the Japanese Occupation, meets the son of a privileged Australian family. She accompanies him to Broome with hope for a better life, despite doubts from her family.
- Western Australian Premier’s Book Award - Fiction 2000
- Shortlisted Kirriyama Rim Pacific Prize, 2000
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The Travel Writer
London, 1985. Ghislaine de Sequeira lies in a hospital. Once an obituary writer in Malacca, she had practised eloquence in the face of death for years. But now she is dying, and it is her bereft daughter Isabelle’s turn to articulate the meaning of a life at its end.
Isabelle tries to stem her grief by seeking solace in her writing tutor and piecing together the story of her mother’s post-war Malaccan life and her desire for the travel writer, a man who alters the course of both women’s lives irrevocably.
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Sustenance
The Elsewhere Hotel in Bali has dreamy villas, a sparkling pool and lush gardens – Find Yourself, promises the hotel’s brochure. The Elsewhere also has Perpetua de Mello weaving her mother’s wisdom with her own multicultural heritage to prepare sumptuous meals for tired Western guests.
It should be the perfect holiday getaway for the newlyweds on their first trip overseas; for the French family in shock; for food writer Rex Broadfoot, who may have more than a professional interest in Perpetua de Mello.
But this paradise has a dark side, and discontent simmers barely beneath the surface. When the peace of the Elsewhere is shattered, it is Perpetua who emerges as an unlikely heroine. As she nourishes them all with her food and compassion each of her guests, unsure if they still have a future, is compelled to look within and consider the real worth of the life they’ve lived so far.
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