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."Queensland Novelist" The Telegraph (26 March 1930): 14. via Trove
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;"An Australian Tom Sawyer" Weekly Times (24 January 1931): 2. via Trove"Pick and the Duffers" Western Champion (24 December 1930): 8. via Trove Wards of the Outer March (1932), set in "convict days in New South Wales", with a disabled Cornish central character;"In Those Bad Old Days" Weekly Times (28 January 1933): 26. via Trove and Bim (for young readers; serialized in 1946, published as a book in 1947).Philip Nielsen, "Locating Queensland Children's Literature: Reef, Bush, and City" in Patrick Buckridge and Melinda McKay, eds., By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland (University of Queensland Press 2007): 289. Her fiction is still read as a representation of white Australian women's experiences of gender and race in the context of colonialism.Belinda McKay, "Writing from the Contact Zone: Fiction by Early Queensland Women" Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Liberation 30(2)(2004): 62.Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Aboriginal Studies Press 2004): 161.
Pick and the Duffers was adapted for an Australian film soon after publication.Yorick, "The Australian Bookman" Daily News (16 July 1932): 14. via Trove It was awarded the second prize of £250 in The Bulletin's novel competition in 1930, beaten by Vance Palmer's The Passage.
Personal life Kay Glasson married Ronald Beresford Taylor in 1916."Taylor–Glasson" Brisbane Courier (26 December 1916): 7. via Trove They had three children (Dorothy, Ian, and Desmond) and lived at Murilla South, Surat, Queensland, on a ranch where they bred Shetland ponies."Writes of the Outback" Queensland Country Life (18 July 1940): 6. via Trove
Kay Glasson Taylor was widowed in 1957, and died in 1998, aged 104 years. Her grave is in Brisbane General (Toowong) Cemetery.Ronald Beresford Taylor, Brisbane General (Toowong) Cemetery.
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