Les Murray (1938-2019) grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales. He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister’s Department. From 1971 he has made literature his full-time career. He was the first Australian poet to achieve international acclaim without expatriation. Murray first visited Europe in the 1960s, and returned frequently to give poetry readings.
Carcanet Press publishes his Collected Poems and his New Selected Poems (2012), as well as his individual collections, including Translations from a Natural World (shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 1993), Subhuman Redneck Poems (awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize 1996), Waiting for the Past (shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2015), and The Biplane Houses (2006), and his essays and prose writings in The Paperbark Tree (1992). His verse novel Fredy Neptune appeared in 1998 and in 2004 won the Mondello Prize in Italy and a major German award at the Leipzig Book Fair. He also edited The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010.
In 1994 Murray was nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry and in 1999 he was awarded The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry at Buckingham Palace, an honour was recommended by the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.
This biography of Les Murray is taken from the Carcanet Press website.
