She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM), General Division, in 2006 'for service to Literature as an author, to the promotion of Australian writers and to support for literary events and professional organisations'.
Marion Mildred Halligan nee Crothall was born in Newcastle, NSW, in 1940, the older sister to Rosie (later Rosanne Fitzgibbons) and Brenda.
Halligan continued to contribute to newspapers via a weekly column in the Canberra Times and in the many book reviews she wrote over subsequent years to which she brought her acute critical mind and her eloquent gifts of appreciation.
Halligan's husband of thirty-five years, Graham, died in 1998; her daughter, Lucy, at the age of 38 in 2004; her beloved sisters, Rosie in 2012 and Brenda in 2014 and lastly, also tragically early, her son James, a talented musician, in 2022.
Halligan's last years were also marked by ill-health as she battled kidney disease, latterly facing dialysis three times a week.
The range of her knowledge was vast, about literature certainly, but also of the other arts, of gastronomy, of French culture, of history, myth, fairy tales, and gardening.
In her writing, Halligan had the great gift of deploying allusions to this knowledge without sounding superior or condescending but in a way that invites the reader to seek out the works referred to for themselves.
Her work is scattered with references to such diverse writers as Dante, Shakespeare, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Proust, T. S. Eliot, Sartre, A.D. Hope, the Brothers Grimm amongst many others.
Her deployment of light irony, self-conscious playfulness, sly humour, the signalling of the fictive world through self-reflexive narration, a tendency sometimes for realism to veer towards magic realism, and her willingness to embrace formal experiment (particularly evident in Lovers' Knots and The Fog Garden), are markers of intellectual and aesthetic sophistication, which, because her work is easy to read, her prose so compelling, it might be easy to overlook.
As Gillian Dooley has said in this regard Marion's work resembles that of Iris Murdoch, not stylistically, not as imitation, but in its range of concerns.
[6] There are feminist perspectives in Halligan's work, but she never succumbs to what Auden called 'the preacher's loose immodest tone'[7] or ideological certainty.
Across many works, she explores or alludes to the various cultural, religious, and mythological resonances of the image – the walled suburban garden with its Paradisal promise notwithstanding the presence of various serpents.
In Eat my Words, Cockles of the Heart, and The Taste of Memory, she seamlessly weaves together autobiography, travel, history, and gastronomy into compelling narratives which are so artful as to seem artless.
Halligan was appointed Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2006 Birthday Honours "for service to literature as an author, to the promotion of Australian writers and to support for literary events and professional organisations.