Les Murray
Biography
Les Murray was born in New South Wales in 1938 and grew up on his grandfather’s dairy farm. He studied arts at the University of Sydney but left without taking his degree. He became a translator (about which he wrote an interesting poem) but, after four years, he resigned and went to live in England accompanied by his wife and two children. He returned to Australia and, after a brief career as a civil servant, became a full-time writer. As a writer of poetry and prose, as well as a reviewer, poetry editor for Angus and Robertson, he has managed a successful career. However, his reputation is primarily based on his poetry and he is recognised as Australia’s leading poet. Fredy Neptune is his first novel. He died in 2019.
Books about Les Murray
Alexander, Peter: Les Murray: A Life in Progress
Other links
Les Murray
Les Murray
Les Murray
Les Murray
Les Murray
Les Murray
Voice of the outback
A life in writing: Les Murray
Les Murray (texts of some of his poems)
Bibliography
1965 The Ilex Tree (poetry)
1969 The Weatherboard Cathedral (poetry)
1972 Poems Against Economics (poetry)
1974 Lunch & Counter Lunch (poetry)
1977 Ethnic Radio (poetry)
1978 The Peasant Mandarin (prose pieces)
1979 The Boys Who Stole the Funeral: a Novel Sequence (verse novel)
1982 Equanimities (poetry)
1982 The Vernacular Republic (poetry)
1983 The People’s Otherworld (poetry)
1983 Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn (poetry)
1984 Persistence in Folly (selected prose)
1984 The Australian Year: The Chronicle of our Seasons and Celebrations
1986 Selected Poems (poetry)
1987 The Daylight Moon (poetry)
1989 The Idyll Wheel (poetry)
1990 Blocks and Tackles: Articles and Essays 1982 to 1990
1990 Dog Fox Field (poetry)
1991 The Rabbiter’s Bounty: Collected Poems (poetry)
1992 The Paperbark Tree (selected prose)
1994 Collected Poems
1992 Translations from the Natural World (poetry)
1996 Subhuman Redneck Poems (poetry)
1996 And Let’s always call it the Commonwealth: One Poet’s View of the Republic
1997 Killing The Black Dog (essay and poetry)
1998 Fredy Neptune (novel in verse)
1999 New Selected Poems (poetry)
1999 The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts about Australia
1999 Conscious and Verbal (poetry)
2000 An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow (poetry)
2000 Learning Human (poetry)
2000 A Working Forest (essays)
2002 Poems the Size of Photographs (poetry)
2002 New Collected Poems (poetry)
2002 The Full Dress, An Encounter with the National Gallery of Australia
2007 The Biplane Houses (poetry)
2010 Taller When Prone (poetry)
2011 Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression (poetry)
2012 2007 The Biplane Houses (poetry) (poetry)
2014 New Selected Poems (poetry)
2015 On Bunyah (poetry)
2015 Waiting For The Past (poetry)