Ruth Park

Writer, born in Auckland, New Zealand. She went to Australia in 1942 and married the author D'Arcy Niland. Her first success was with the novel The Harp in the South (1947), a story of slum life in Sydney which has been translated into 10 languages, and forms a trilogy with Poor Man's Orange (1949) and Missus (1986). Her work includes several other novels, as well as short stories, and scripts for film, television, and radio. She created the popular Muddle-Headed Wombat series of children's books, and has written fiction for adolescent readers. Her best-selling autobiography A Fence Around the Cuckoo was published in 1992.

Ruth Park is an author born in New Zealand who spent most of her life in Australia.

During the Great Depression her working class father worked on bush roads, as a driver, on relief work, as a sawmill hand, and finally shifted back to Auckland as council worker living in a state house. When she was told a writer, the woman suggested she'd be happier as a servant.) Ruth Park claims that she was involved in the Queen Street riots with her father.

Her first novel was The Harp in the South (1948) - a story of Irish slum life in Sydney which was translated into 10 languages. (Simple-minded critics called it a cruel fantasy because as far as they were concerned there were no slums in Sydney.) But Ruth and D'Arcy did live in Sydney slums at Surry Hills. She also wrote a novel based in New Zealand, One-a-pecker, Two-a-pecker (1957), about gold mining in Otago (later renamed The Frost and The Fire).

Ruth Park won the Miles Franklin Award for Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977), the Boston Globe Award for Playing Beatie Bow (1980), and was awarded the 1993 Lloyd O'Neil Magpie Award for services to the Australian book industry.

She claims to be a descendant of Dr Mungo Park, the African explorer, though there is yet to be any evidence of this.

Apart from her writing she also brought up 5 children.

Some of her most famous works include:

The Harp in the South (1948) Poor Man's Orange (1949) Missus (1985) Playing Beatie Bow (1980) The Muddle-Headed Wombat series (1962-1982) Ruth Park's "Harp in the South" Novels ISBN 0-14-010456-9