Lily Brett
| Lily Brett | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lilijahne Brajtsztajn 5 September 1946 Feldafing displaced persons camp, Bavaria, Germany |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist, poet |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Citizenship | Australian |
| Notable works | The Auschwitz Poems, Things Could Be Worse, Just Like That, Too Many Men, You Gotta Have Balls, Lola Bensky |
| Notable awards | C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry, Commonwealth Writers' Prize Prix Médicis étranger |
| Years active | 1966–present |
| Spouses |
|
| Children | 3 |
| Website | |
| lilybrett |
|
Lily Brett (born Lilijahne Brajtsztajn 5 September 1946, Feldafing displaced persons camp, Bavaria) is a Australian novelist, essayist and poet. She lived in North Carlton, Melbourne from 1948 to 1989 and then in New York City. In Australia she had an early career as a pop music journalist, including writing for teen magazine Go-Set from May 1966 to September 1968. From 1979 she started writing poems, prose fiction and non-fiction. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, her works include depictions of family life including living in Melbourne and New York. Four of her fictional novels are Things Could Be Worse (1990), Just Like That (1994), Too Many Men (2001) and You Gotta Have Balls (2005).
Brett's parents, Max (born Mojsze Brajtsztajn, 1916) and Rose (née Szpindler, ca.1921–1986), lived in Łódź, Poland before the outbreak of World War II. During that war they survived more than five years of Nazi control including being confined to the Łódź Ghetto, where they married, in occupied Poland, before being taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were eventually separated. After the European theatre of war ended in May 1945 it took six months for the couple to find each other. Brett was born as Luba Brajsztajn (Germanicised as Lilijahne Breitstein) in 1946 in Feldafing displaced persons camp, Bavaria, Germany.
Brett was aged two (1948) before her parents were able to leave Germany and emigrate to Melbourne, Australia. She later recalled "I grew up in North Carlton knowing there had been a catastrophe, but my parents revealed only odd fragments. Then I started reading about the Holocaust and have never stopped." Her younger sister, Doris Brett, was born in 1950, she later became a clinical psychologist and writer. Rosa worked "behind a sewing machine in a factory." Brett attended University High School, Melbourne but did not matriculate – instead of sitting two of her final exams she watched Hitchcock's Psycho.
...
Wikipedia