Marion Halligan explores love and fertility in Paris
Christopher Bantick writing in Brisbane's Courier-Mail,March 06, 2009

MARION Halligan's Canberra kitchen is a welcoming kind of place. It suggests busyness and creativity. On her long refectory-style table, worn smooth with the elbows of guests, there are papers and books.

Halligan has just returned from a week in Adelaide, where she teaches an online course in gastronomic writing at the University of South Australia.
Besides being an award-winning author for her well-read fiction, Halligan is a writer for whom multi-tasking is a way of life. She is an essayist, critic and short-story writer who wears her success lightly. Even so, she has won the ACT Book of the year, the Nita B Kibble Award, The Steele Rudd Award, the 3M Talking Book of the Year as well as being shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Dublin IMPAC Prize and the Miles Franklin Award.
Her latest book, Valley of Grace,(Allen & Unwin), is a tale set in Paris, a city Halligan loves and knows well. The story is a tableau of intersecting lives. This is not unfamiliar territory for Halligan. Nothing is ever quite as it seems.
· Read our review of Valley of Grace
· Read an excerpt from Valley of Grace


Use the above link to the Courier-Mail for more.

Footnote:
Marion Halligan was one of the quiet stars of the Christchurch Writers Festival in September 2008. The Bookman is a huge fan of her writing about food and I have several of her books, (The Taste of Memory is superb and the one I would recommend if you haven't read her before), but of course she is also a widely admired fiction writer as well and I have a copy of her new novel to read. Meantime I am pleased to run the above review from the Courier-Mail.
Marion Halligan is one of Australia's great contemporary writers and deserves to be better known on this side of The Tasman.