Thea Astley

In 2005, the Thea Astley lecture was instituted at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, with Kate Grenville delivering the inaugural one.

Thea Astley died at the John Flynn Hospital on the Gold Coast in 2004.

In 1997, Thea Astley wrote in a column for Australian House & Garden magazine that "For me the chief advantage of writing is that it can be done anywhere. I recall writing almost the whole of a short story in Hunting the Wild Pineapple on a plane coming down from Cooktown. I've taken copious notes at a luncheon table in Santo, in small pub rooms in Charleville and Roma when I was on the Writers' Train. I've written in a convent bedroom on Palm Island, on the wharf at Magnetic [Island]".

Astley found her material in newspaper stories and through her travels, but mostly in the various communities she and her husband lived in. In north Queensland, for example, she "found a wealth of stories and 'screwball' characters by listening to people in the small towns and wilderness of the tropics". In 1997, she wrote "Sadly, the north has changed. As we say up there: beautiful one day, developed the next. I keep writing about it. I can't help myself".

Astley's novels won four Miles Franklin Awards and in 1989 the author won the Patrick White Award for services to Australian literature and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Queensland. Much of her writing, which draws heavily from her early childhood, is set in Queensland, which she has described as "the place where the tall yarn happens, where it is lived out by people who are the dramatis personae of the tall yarns."

In her early years she was friends with Patrick White, Hal Porter and Thomas Keneally. She had few female literary contemporaries until the 1980s.

Astley has a significant place in Australian letters as she was "the only woman novelist of her generation to have won early success and published consistently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the literary world was heavily male-dominated".

Her first book, Girl with a monkey was published in 1958. The author noted that "I wrote quite a bit of it before Ed was born and entered it in the Herald and got an honourable mention. So I thought. 'Oh well, I'll bung it into A&R's, which was the only publisher I knew'". After the publication of her third book, The Well-dressed Explorer, the Herald's reviewer, Sidney J. Baker, wrote "With this book, Miss Astley earns a place among the leaders of modern Australian fiction". He associated her with writers such as Patrick White and Hal Porter who wrote "poetic prose ... an important but by no means popular dimension to Australian fiction". Her early style, in particular, used "obscure polysyllables, formal syntax and lush imagery [which] divided critics and daunted many readers".

Born in Brisbane and educated at All Hallows' School, Astley studied arts at the University of Queensland then trained to become a teacher. After marrying Jack Gregson in 1948, she moved to Sydney where she taught at various high schools, as well as kept up with her writing. She tutored at Macquarie University from 1968 to 1980, before retiring to write full-time, at which time she and her husband moved to Kuranda in North Queensland. In the late 1980s they moved to Nowra, New South Wales, on the state's south coast, and, after her husband's death in 2003, she moved to Byron Bay to be near her only child, Ed Gregson, a musician and television producer.

Thea Beatrice May Astley AO (25 August 1925 – 17 August 2004) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. She was a prolific writer who was published for over 40 years from 1958. At the time of her death, she had won more Miles Franklin Awards, Australia's major literary award, than any other writer. As well as being a writer, she taught at all levels of education – primary, secondary and tertiary.