Azzopardi, Trezza 1961-

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Azzopardi, Trezza 1961-

PERSONAL:

Born 1961, in Cardiff, Wales. Education: University of East Anglia, B.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Norwich, England.

CAREER:

Writer. Creative and Cultural Studies, Norwich School of Art and Design, Norwich, England, external examiner.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Mann Booker Prize shortlist citation, and James Tait Black Memorial Prize shortlist, all 2000, all for The Hiding Place.

WRITINGS:

The Hiding Place (novel), Picador (London, England), 2000, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Remember Me (novel), Grove Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Winterton Blue (novel), Grove Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of short stories to periodicals in Great Britain.

ADAPTATIONS:

The Hiding Place was adapted for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime program, and has been translated into fourteen languages.

SIDELIGHTS:

Trezza Azzopardi grew up in Wales, the daughter of a Maltese immigrant father and a Welsh mother. Memories of her working-class neighborhood in Cardiff color her debut novel, The Hiding Place. Although the book is not based on real events, it is presented in a modified memoir format that runs back and forth chronologically and from first person to third person. The story revolves around Dolores Gauci, the youngest of six daughters born to Frankie Gauci, a Maltese immigrant with a penchant for gambling, and his wife, Mary. Frankie's high-stakes life seems to unravel with the birth of his daughter, as he loses his share of a lucrative business and his home in a card game the night she is born. Dolores grows up quickly in an environment of poverty and alienation that leaves lasting scars on all of her sisters, who are eventually dispersed to early marriages, reform school, and foster homes. In the latter part of the novel, Dolores reunites with her siblings, only to find them hostile to her attempts to recover authentic memories of her earliest years.

A Publishers Weekly critic praised The Hiding Place as a "brilliant psychological prose poem of a family united only in helplessness and despair." Leo Carey, writing in the New York Times Book Review, commended Azzopardi's "credible and compelling descriptions of family life," adding that the novel's "descriptive richness is its greatest strength." Women's Review of Books contributor Carol Anshaw noted that the novel explores "the ways hardship, violence and thwarted love can profoundly inform children as they are on their way to becoming adults." Anshaw further commented that Azzopardi "writes with authority, working in an elegant dialect of dreams."

In her second novel, Azzopardi once again confronts the vagaries of memory, this time through the fractured recollections of a homeless woman. Remember Me begins when an elderly woman is robbed of her few precious belongings by another street person. As she searches for the robber, the woman recalls fragments of her childhood, youth, and early adulthood. Azzopardi told Bookseller that she loosely based her central character on a street person she remembered from her youth in Cardiff. "As a character she is quite upsetting for me," the author admitted, "so I think it was fortunate that the writing flowed freely, because if I hadn't been able to write quite quickly in some passages, it wouldn't have happened at all." In her Booklist review of the novel, Donna Seaman praised Azzopardi for her "canny sense of the link between trauma and mental instability" and concluded that the prose "is spellbinding."

Winterton Blue, Azzopardi's third novel, explores a romance between two people who are trying to overcome the traumatic losses they suffered in childhood. Lewis has suffered for years from guilt over the death of his twin brother; Anna, his landlady's daughter, is lonely, withdrawn, and has been partially deaf since her father's death when she was seven years old. Anna and Lewis are drawn to each other, but Lewis is also on the edge of insanity. Their story is "darkly charming," according to a Kirkus Reviews writer, who also noted that despite some stylistic flaws, "the novel's odd logic nevertheless draws the reader in."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, January, 2001, review of The Hiding Place, pp. 85-86; June, 2004, Christina Schwarz, review of Remember Me, p. 125.

Booklist, September 1, 2000, Marlene Chamberlain, review of The Hiding Place, p. 64; January 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Remember Me, p. 818.

Bookseller, January 9, 2004, "A Difficult Task for a Writer," p. 32.

Book World, April 4, 2004, review of Remember Me, p. 6.

Economist (U.K.), October 28, 2000, "Burning Bright," p. 82.

Guardian (London, England), October 23, 2000, "My Media: Trezza Azzopardi."

Houston Chronicle, Barbara Liss, "A Family Album Bleak Enough to Make One Weep."

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2003, review of Remember Me, p. 1; October 15, 2006, review of Winterton Blue, p. 1031.

Library Journal, October 15, 2000, Eleanor J. Bader, review of The Hiding Place, p. 100; December, 2003, Eleanor J. Bader, review of Remember Me, p. 162.

New York, February 19, 2001, Daniel Mendelsohn, review of The Hiding Place, p. 187.

New York Times, January 9, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, "Dead Bunnies Are the Least of Their Problems," p. B10.

New York Times Book Review, January 14, 2001, Leo Carey, "Snake Eyes," review of The Hiding Place, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, November 6, 2000, review of The Hiding Place, p. 70; February 9, 2004, review of Remember Me, p. 57; October 30, 2006, review of Winterton Blue, p. 32.

Women's Review of Books, April, 2001, Carol Anshaw, "In Terra Incognita," review of The Hiding Place, p. 11; October, 2004, Diana Postlethwaite, review of Remember Me, p. 16.