Fay Zwicky (1933–2017), poet and academic, grew up in Brighton, Melbourne, where her European Jewish family had lived for four generations. She took piano lessons at the Conservatorium and completed an arts degree at the University of Melbourne in 1954. For the next decade she and her sisters worked around Europe, the USA and Indonesia as the Rosefield Trio. In 1961, she and her husband Karl Zwicky settled in Perth, where from 1972 to 1987 she lectured in literature at the University of Western Australia. Her first volume of verse, Isaac Babel's Fiddle (1975) was followed by her 'breakthrough' work Kaddish and Other Poems (1982), containing reflections on the life of her father; other works include collections of short stories, Hostages (1983) and essays, The Lyre in the Pawnshop (1986). Zwicky won the Western Australia Premier's Book Award three times, as well as the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Patrick White Award, the Christopher Brennan Award and the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award.
Jacqueline Mitelman's evocative photograph of Zwicky was used on the cover of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky, published soon after her death in 2017. As Mitelman noted of her portraiture: 'I'm interested in the eyes, try to get some sort of straight gaze, where at least you have the impression that you're contacting the essence of that person.'
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