Lily Brett (born Lilijahne Brajtsztajn 5 September 1946, Feldafing displaced persons camp, Bavaria, Germany) is an Australian novelist, essayist and poet. She lived in North Carlton and then Elwood/Caulfield (suburbs of Melbourne) from 1948 to 1968, in London 1968–1971, Melbourne (1971–1989) and then moved permanently to New York City. In Australia she had an early career as a pop music journalist, including writing for music magazine Go-Set from May 1966 to September 1968. From 1979 she started writing poems, prose fiction and non-fiction. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, her works include depictions of family life including living in Melbourne and New York. Four of her fictional novels are Things Could Be Worse (1990), Just Like That (1994), Too Many Men (2001) and You Gotta Have Balls (2005). Early life Brett's parents, Max (born Mojsze Brajtsztajn, 1916) and Rose (née Rozka Szpindler, ca. 1921–1986), lived in Łódź, Poland before the outbreak of World War II. During that war they survived more than five years of Nazi control including being confined to the Łódź Ghetto, where they married, in occupied Poland, before being taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were eventually separated. After the European theatre of war ended in May 1945 it took six months for the couple to find each other. Brett was born as Luba Brajsztajn (Germanicised as Lilijahne Breitstein) in 1946 in Feldafing displaced persons camp, Bavaria, Germany. Brett was aged two (1948) before her parents were able to leave Germany and emigrate to Melbourne, Australia. She later recalled "I grew up in North Carlton knowing there had been a catastrophe, but my parents revealed only odd fragments. Then I started reading about the Holocaust and have never stopped." Her younger sister, Doris Brett, was born in 1950, she later became a clinical psychologist. Rosa worked "behind a sewing machine in a factory." Brett attended University High School, Melbourne but did not matriculate – instead of sitting two of her final exams she watched Hitchcock's Psycho. Career 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