William Gosse Hay (17 November 1875, Adelaide – 21 March 1945, Victor Harbor) was an Australian author and essayist.
He was educated by a private tutor on his parents' cattle station, then at Melbourne Grammar School, subsequently at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied law.
In 1911, as administrator of the estate of his brother Alexander Gosse Hay (1874–1901), he was involved in legal argument related to the insurance paid out on the destruction by fire of his parents' Victor Harbor home "Mt.
They had three sons: The Australian novelist Christina Stead recommended Hay's 1918 novel and noted that Patrick White also admired it: I have just finished a truly remarkable novel...: The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans (and the Mystery of Mr. Daunt)... by author William Hay..., writing about the penal settlement days in Tasmania (one of our worst convict settlements, that of Port Arthur).
This magnificent writer is a most serious deepdyed scholar, student of the epoch and his work is a sort of epic, an Inferno, not the usual horror-story of beatings and killings in prison... an ascent from Avernus.