In 1966, Brett successfully applied to be a music journalist at pop music weekly,
Go-Set, and in May she replaced founding feature writer, Doug Panther. She later reflected, "My career is inexplicable and it's a career path that nobody should follow! It basically starts with an 18-year old refusing to go to university because that was the one thing that my parents wanted of me, that and to be slim. So I defied both of those desires. My mother said I had to get a job, which shocked me. There was a new newspaper opening up in Australia called
Go-Set and I walked into the office and I started work the next day. I don't think this would happen today." The paper's editor was Tony Schauble, and according to
Go-Set staff photographer, Colin Beard, "[Brett] had been to see Schauble several times and had made a favourable impression on him and more importantly, she had a car, which was an attractive incentive to employ her." Young described Brett's style "She seemed genuinely interested in the pop stars she interviewed, but she could also be intimidating at times." Soon after returning to Australia Brett married Rob Lovett (ex-
the Loved Ones guitarist) and the couple had two children. They later divorced, and she married artist
David Rankin. Brett regularly appeared on
Uptight, one of the first weekly national TV shows devoted to pop music, While working for
Go-Set, early in 1968, Brett became a band manager for a newly formed male soul vocal trio, the Virgil Brothers, modelled on
the Walker Brothers. In May Hadley left and was replaced by
Peter Doyle. The group issued three singles, "
Temptation's 'Bout to Get Me" (June 1968), "Here I Am" (September) and "When You Walk Away" (September 1969). Renowned academic Samuel Fell explains that by traveling to London, New York, Los Angeles and Monterey in 1967, and interviewing the world’s leading pop stars including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger, Lily Brett ended the sense of cultural isolation and irrelevance of many of the young 1960's generation of Australians. From 1979 she resumed writing: including poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction. Brett published her first collection of poetry,
The Auschwitz Poems, in 1986, which was illustrated by Rankin's drawings. Winning many awards,
The Auschwitz Poems was awarded the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards:
C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in 1987. Her short story, "Luba", was entered in the National Short Story of the Year competition in 1988 and received an honourable mention. Brett's first work of fiction,
Things Could Be Worse, appeared in 1990. Stephanie Green of
The Canberra Times described it in April that year as a set of "self-contained [stories], they are all about a group of Jewish immigrants living in Melbourne after World War II. The characters form a community, strive to success in a new land, fend off the memories of war, and hold on to their sense of what it means to be Jewish in the face of centuries of displacement." Green's fellow reviewer, Helen Elliott, felt
Just Like That (1994) showed that "The joke, and the entire seriousness of this brilliant novel, lies in the way Brett has turned the anguish of generations into art... [and] has created an unusually lovely woman [Ester Zepler, the protagonist], full of laughter, torn with anxiety, capable of malice and brimming with love." Her fifth and most celebrated novel,
Too Many Men, was published in 2001.
Publishers Weekly staff writer felt that "The hardest effect to bring off in fiction is a vision that is at once tender, deeply comic and yet aware of the ultimate sadness of life, the lachrymae rerum. Brett has succeeded triumphantly." Helen Greenwood of
The Sydney Morning Herald finds that "Brett herself travels a brave road to joy, instead of the tracks of despair, which is not an easy path for a born worrier. To do so, she sidelines one of the major characters in her work, the Holocaust, and the book is the less for it.".
Lola Bensky (2013), Brett's seventh novel was short-listed for the
Miles Franklin Literary Award and it received the 2014
Prix Medicis étranger prize in France. Brett has published ten volumes of poetry, four collections of essays, and seven novels. She has also contributed writings to a wide range of newspaper and literary publications, including many columns and articles in
Die Zeit,
The Australian,
Die Welt,
Le Monde,
Libération,
Sydney Morning Herald,
The Age,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. A portrait of Lily Brett hangs in the
National Portrait Gallery. The movie adaptation of "
Too Many Men", titled
Treasure was directed by
Julia Von Heinz, and stars
Lena Dunham, and
Stephen Fry. '
Treasure had its global premiere at the
74th Berlin International Film Festival, and its US premiere at the
Tribeca Film Festival on June 8, 2024. A movie edition of the book retitled
Treasure was published by William Morrow in May 2024 in the US. == Bibliography ==