Giulia Giuffrè is an Australian writer. She was born in Sydney in 1951. Her mother, Marie de Lorenzo, was Australian-born of Italian parents (from Naples and from Salina), and her father, Gaetano (Tom) Annibale Giuffrè, emigrated to Australia from Salina (Æolian Islands) near Sicily.
Giulia grew up in the Sydney suburb of Kensington and attended Brigidine Convent, Randwick. She majored in English, French and Italian at Sydney University and graduated with B.A. First Class Honours and the University Medal in English Literature. She was awarded a travelling scholarship to the UK and gained her doctorate from Oxford University with a thesis entitled Tobias Smollett, William Hogarth and the art of caricature. After taking up a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Yale University she returned to Australia in 1980 and lectured in English and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney for a number of years. She has published articles on 18th Century English literature, Australian women’s writing (To be Australian, a woman and a writer, 1987), children’s literature, Australian culture (Reconciling past and present in terms of culture and identity, 1996) and literary reviews. In 1988 she moved to Woodhill near Berry with her then-husband, artist Brett Bailey and their two children, Orlando (b. 1985) and Sophia (b. 1987). There she completed her book A Writing Life (Allen & Unwin, 1990), a collection of interviews with the older generation of Australian women writers, including Christina Stead, Marjorie Barnard and Kylie Tennant. The Giuffrè Collection of interviews is held in the National Library of Australia, Canberra. From 1995 to 2005 Giulia Giuffrè lived in Camden, 50k southwest of Sydney. During this time she was Associate lecturer in Italian and part-time lecturer in English Literature at The University of Sydney, and she also taught at Wollongong University.In 1992 Giulia Giuffrè explored her Italian childhood in an essay Who do you think you are? published in the collection of the same name (Redress Press, 1992), a piece subsequently anthologised in the Oxford Book of Australian Essays (OUP, 1997). Along with Who do you think you are? a review article on Australian children’s literature (Voices, Summer 1993-4) initiated a train of thought and association which led ultimately to Primavera. From the end of 2005 Giulia Giuffrè has been living and writing in Sydney, NSW. Miniature schnauzers, Magnus and Cosmo, share her home. |