Elisabeth Holdsworth was born in The Netherlands. She migrated to Australia with her parents in 1959. On her father’s side she is the scion of an aristocratic, Calvinist family. On her mother’s she is the last thread of a Jewish line. Her first novel, Those Who Come After (Pan Macmillan) was widely-acclaimed and later published in the Netherlands and Poland. Elisabeth was the winner of the Inaugural Calibre Prize (Australian Book Review) for An Die Nachgeborenen, inaugural essayist for the Wheeler Centre’s Long View Series, winner of the Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival prize for an essay, 2014, and winner of the 2017 Australian Book Review RAFT Fellowship..
Her articles, reviews and commentaries have appeared in The Monthly, Australian Book Review and Transnational. Elisabeth has published short stories and poetry in literary journals, including Southerly, Island, Ginninderra Press Anthology, Mattoid and others. Her essays have appeared in The Monthly, ABR,Heat, Southerly, Best Australian Essays and Australia a Cricket Country (Hardie Grant, 2011).
Her prize-winning essay, An Die Nachgeborenen, will be republished in book form as part of an ABR collection in 2018.
Praise for Those Who Come After
‘Memory and imagination, memoir and fiction are invisibly linked in Elisabeth Holdsworth’s Those Who Come After.’ Brenda Niall, The Age
‘Those Who Come After is important . . . it offers freshness – and a voice which goes directly to the heart of things . . . a must read.’ Dorothy Johnston, Sydney Morning Herald
‘An elegant and beautifully structured work . . . rich and contextually flawless.’ Sue Ebury, Australian Book Review
‘This is an astoundingly self-assured first novel.’ Daniella Roller, Sunday Herald Sun
‘Set in Europe, 1950’s Elsternwick, Victoria and Goulburn, NSW TWCA pulled me in, offering an accomplished unravelling of tales about a Zeeland family bound up with the Dutch House of Orange.’ Gay Lynch, Transnational
‘Those Who Come After is an idiosyncratic novel, absolutely itself, which fits into no mould.’ Gillian Dooley, Writers Radio Adelaide
‘A book that makes you want to reach for an atlas is a lovely thing . . . The idea of homesickness is beautifully articulated.’ Lucy Clark, Sunday Telegraph
‘Those Who Come After is radical, deeply shocking, heartbreaking and often blackly funny. It delivers with superb intelligence and stylistic ease. A canny unsentimental insight into human courage, endurance and bastardry.’ Marion May Campbell, author of Lines of flight et al.