Kay Glasson Taylor (8 July 1893 – 14 May 1998) was an Australian novelist.
Early life
Katherine "Kay" Glasson was born in Queensland. All of her grandparents were Cornish Australians; three of them were born in Bathurst, New South Wales. Her younger sister Deirdre Tregarthen was a poet. Kay Glasson attended medical school in Sydney.[1]
Career
Novels by Kay Glasson Taylor include Ginger for Pluck (published under the pseudonym "Daniel Hamline", for young readers, 1929); Pick and the Duffers (1930), called "an Australian Tom Sawyer" by more than one reviewer;[2][3] Wards of the Outer March (1932), set in "convict days in New South Wales", with a disabled Cornish central character;[4] and Bim (for young readers; serialized in 1946, published as a book in 1947).[5] Her fiction is still read as a representation of white Australian women's experiences of gender and race in the context of colonialism.[6][7]
Pick and the Duffers was adapted for an Australian film soon after publication.[8] It was awarded the second prize of £250 in The Bulletin's novel competition in 1930, beaten by Vance Palmer's The Passage.[9]
Personal life
Kay Glasson married Ronald Beresford Taylor in 1916.[10] They had three children (Dorothy, Ian, and Desmond) and lived at Murilla South, Surat, Queensland, on a ranch where they bred Shetland ponies.[11]
Kay Glasson Taylor was widowed in 1957, and died in 1998, aged 104 years. Her grave is in Brisbane General (Toowong) Cemetery.[12]