Biography
Australian JL (Judith or Judy) Crozier has been writing for much of her life – from a melodramatic thirty-page epic written at the age of 12 (reversing her friends’ names to make her characters sound foreign) to now. In between, she has been a journalist and an award-winning short story writer. She has also been a community worker, local government representative, a creative writing teacher, a singing teacher and a blues singer, an editor of journals and a proof-reader for seven years of the Victoria Government Gazette, in the State of Victoria, Australia. ‘I believe you can get less for murder,’ she laughs.
Judy had a lot of time to read as a child, living an isolated life in Vietnam of the 60s where her father was attached to the Australian Embassy in Saigon. She attended a French convent there, Les Oiseaux in Saigon (pictured below – back row). By the time her family left, she had read her way through the entire children’s section of the British Council Library and halfway through the adult section, beginning with Thackeray and Dickens. This explains her interest in Victorians.
She was born in Malaya and also lived in Burma (below) as a small child, where her father was a mining engineer.
Her short stories have won awards in competitions in Australia, in Ireland (online) and in the US (also online). For the past few years she has concentrated on novel-writing, and has a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. This involved intensive research as well as the first chapters of her novel based in Victorian London.
‘It was a time of enormous change and contradiction, exciting and terrifying for a woman – such as my main character, whose future looks pretty uncertain,’ says Judy. ‘Life in burgeoning London was urgent, exciting… and cheap.’
Britain has continued to give us all a sometimes unwanted sense of adventure, Judy comments wryly. Brexit has made it close to impossible to buy What Empty Things Are These in Europe, what with taxes and an occasionally wobbly publishing industry. However, those determined to read a great book on Victorian women breaking free can track it down on Amazon, or order it from bookshops in the US and Australia.
Still, all undaunted, Judy has two novels awaiting attention by agents and publishers. One is a fiction based on Australians in Vietnam of the 1960s (working title: Tell Me) and the other is a fiction based on the life of a vicar in country Victoria, Australia. This is set in the first half of the 20th Century, where our vicar is coping, sometimes well and sometimes not, with a rapidly changing world.
At the same time, she not only has a modest name for drawing and painting, but is also heading a campaign urging the French and Australian governments to negotiate a Social Security Agreement (SSA) that will allow Australians resident in France to apply for their own state pensions.
Judy lives in southern France.
‘We all thought we’d be fine, since Australia has SSAs with 22 out of the 27 countries of the EU. You’d think France would be on that list…’ says Judy. There are now 900 members of her group Australian Pensions in France.
She’s become very good at writing letters to Ministers and leaders, though that’s not quite the trajectory she was expecting of her writing career.
Sometimes, she still has time to write short stories.
‘I live at the scruffy, interesting end of southern France,’ she says, ‘with working villages that are close to towns, beaches, mountains and lots of reminders of Romans and medieval history.’ She took herself here in 2015 to be closer to the world and for new experiences. She found her perfect village and can now practice the French she first learned as a child in Vietnam.