Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923-1958

Dorothy Hewett

Republished for a new generation of readers, this extraordinary autobiography traces the personal and political metamorphoses of Dorothy Hewett’s first thirty-five years.

After university, several failed love affairs, an attempted suicide and a major poetry prize, Dorothy Hewett joined the Australian Communist party in 1945. Four years later she left her husband and moved to Redfern, Sydney with her lover, a boilermaker.

A woman who challenged sexual and political conventions, Hewett combined the passions of her life with her power as a writer to create this classic of people, place and political history.

Also in UWA Publishing’s Dorothy Hewett series: Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett (2010) and Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett (2011).

Praise for Wild Card:

A decade after Hewett’s death, UWA Publishing has reissued this extraordinary autobiography in a beautifully packaged, reader-friendly format…Like the best writers' autobiographies, Wild Card elucidates how and why various tropes, images, metaphors, and characters have informed Hewett’s oeuvre.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

 

This autobiography does not disappoint: it is a vibrant study of a unique and talented woman of Australian letters.

FARM WEEKLY

 

Hewett’s powerful and ebullient personality is writ large on every page. This is a significant autobiography of a strong, creative woman who was both complex and funny. A must-read.

THE WEST AUSTRALIAN

 

[Hewett] captures perfectly idealistic youthful bohemianism and the airlessness of old farming family life…Wild Card draws its strengths from Hewett’s shrewdly witty phrasing and an oddly astute sense of melodrama.

PELICAN MAGAZINE

Book details

PUBLICATION DATE: 2012
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 406 pages
SIZE: 234 x 153 mm
ISBN: 9781742583952
RIGHTS: World
CATEGORY: Biography and Autobiography, Dorothy Hewett, General Non-fiction,