Maddern, Philippa
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1952-2014) Australian academic and author who wrote fiction as Pip Maddern, beginning with her best-known story, "The Ins and Outs of the Hadhya City-State" in The Altered I (anth 1976) edited by Lee Harding, a tale perhaps influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, featuring a profoundly intricate City from which it is impossible to escape. In another story of strong interest, "Inhabiting the Interspaces" in Australian Science Fiction (anth 1979) edited by Van Ikin, a young renegade woman tries to conceal herself in the interstices (see Wainscot Societies) of a corporate world which will soon discover her disloyalty. She wrote several more stories, two appearing as late as the 1990s, but did not collect them nor publish a novel. After the mid-1970s she focused on academic work, publishing her University of Oxford DPhil thesis as Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422-1442 (1992) as P C Maddern; on her return to Australia she became a member of the faculty of the University of Western Australia, eventually serving as chair of history and head of the School of Humanities; as with her fiction, much of her academic work focused on the role of women, from a historically oriented Feminist position. [JC]
see also: Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference.
Philippa Catherine Maddern
born Wodonga, New South Wales: 1952
died Perth, Western Australia: 16 June 2014
works (selected)
- Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422-1442 (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1992) as P C Maddern [nonfiction: hb/]
links
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