Friends and Rivals

Brenda Niall is an Australian author, literary critic and journalist, born in 1930. She has degrees from the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and Monash University. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for 'services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic'. Her first book was the biography, Martin Boyd (1974). Her later work includes Life Class, The Riddle of Father Hackett: a life in Ireland and Australia, True North: the story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack and Mannix, for which she won the 2016 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and the 2016 National Biography Award, presented by the State Library of New South Wales.

030