Les Murray

Leslie Allan Murray (17 October 1938 – 29 April 2019) was an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spanned over 40 years and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings.

Translations of Murray's poetry have been published in 11 languages: French, German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian, and Dutch. Murray's poetry won many awards and he is regarded as "the leading Australian poet of his generation". He was rated in 1997 by the National Trust of Australia as one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures.

Early life and education Leslie Allan Murray was born on 17 October 1938,

In 1957, Murray entered the University of Sydney in the Faculty of Arts and joined the Royal Australian Navy Reserve to obtain a small income. Speaking about this time to Clive James he said: "I was as soft-headed as you could imagine. I was actually hanging on to childhood because I hadn't had much teenage. My Mum died and my father collapsed. I had to look after him. So I was off the chain at last, I was in Sydney and I didn't quite know how to do adulthood or teenage. I was being coltish and foolish and childlike. I received the least distinguished degree Sydney ever issued. I don't think anyone's ever matched it." In 1961 The Bulletin published one of Murray's poems. Clive James, and Lex Banning, as well as future political journalists Laurie Oakes and Mungo McCallum Jr. Between times, he hitch-hiked around Australia. Murray lived for several months at a Sydney Push household at Milsons Point, where he read Virgil's Eclogues at the suggestion of his host, Brian Jenkins. The couple lived in Wales and Scotland and travelled in Europe for over a year in the late 1960s. They had five children together. Their son Alexander was diagnosed with autism, which prompted Murray to discover traits of the condition in himself. In an interview with Image, Murray described himself as "a high-performing Asperger".

In 1971, Murray resigned from his "respectable cover occupations" of translator and public servant in Canberra to write poetry full-time. The family returned to Sydney, but Murray, planning to return to his home at Bunyah, managed to buy back part of the lost family home in 1975 and to visit there intermittently until 1985, when he and his family returned to live there permanently. His wife, Valerie, died on 30 September 2025 at a Tuncurry nursing home, aged 84.

Literary career Murray had a long career in poetry and literary journalism in Australia. When he was 38 years old, his Selected Poems was published by Angus & Robertson, signifying his emergence as a leading poet. Murray edited the magazine Poetry Australia (1973–79). Murray was talked of as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Murray retired as literary editor of Quadrant in late 2018 for health reasons.

Poetry Murray published around 30 volumes of poetry and is often called Australia's bush-bard. The academic David McCooey described Murray in 2002 as "a traditional poet whose work is radically original". His poetry is rich and diverse, while also exhibiting "an obvious unity and wholeness" based on "his consistent commitment to the ideals and values of what he sees as the real Australia". In 2003, Australian poet Peter Porter, reviewing Murray's New Collected Poems, makes a somewhat similar paradoxical assessment of Murray:"A skewer of polemic runs through his work. His brilliant manipulation of language, his ability to turn words into installations of reality, is often forced to hang on an embarrassing moral sharpness. The parts we love – the Donne-like baroque – live side by side with sentiments we don't: his increasingly automatic opposition to liberalism and intellectuality."

Themes and subjects Twelve years after Murray's induced birth, his mother miscarried another child. She died after the doctor failed to call an ambulance. Literary critic Lawrence Bourke writes that "Murray, linking his birth to her death, traces his poetic vocation from these traumatic events, seeing in them the relegation of the rural poor by urban élites. Dispossession, relegation, and independence become major preoccupations of his poetry". Beyond this, though, his poetry is generally seen to have a nationalistic bent. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature writes that: The continuing themes of much of his poetry are those inherent in that traditional nationalistic identity – respect, even reverence, for the pioneers; the importance of the land and its shaping influence on the Australian character, down-to-earth, laconic ... and based on such Bush-bred qualities as egalitarianism, practicality, straight-forwardness and independence; special respect for that Australian character in action in wartime ... and a brook-no-argument preference for the rural life over the sterile and corrupting urban environment.

Awards and nominations 1984 – Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for The People's Other World 1989 – Creative Arts Fellowship 1989 – Officer of the Order of Australia for services to Australian literature 1991 – Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for Dog Fox Field 1993 – Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for Translations from the Natural World 1995 – Petrarca-Preis (Petrarch Prize) 1996 – T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems 1997 – Rated by the National Trust of Australia as one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures. 1969: The Weatherboard Cathedral, Sydney, Angus & Robertson 1972: Poems Against Economics, Angus & Robertson 1974: Lunch and Counter Lunch, Angus & Robertson Carcanet 2002: Poems the Size of Photographs, Duffy & Snellgrove and Carcanet Press 2002: New Collected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove; Carcanet Press, 2003 2006: The Biplane Houses, Carcanet Press. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 2010: Taller When Prone, Black Inc Publishing 2011: Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 86 pp (autobiographical) 2014: New Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2015: Waiting for the Past, Black Inc. 2015: The Tin Wash Dish, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press 2015: On Bunyah, Black Inc Publishing 2018: Collected Poems, Black Inc Publishing 2022: Continuous Creation: Last Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Collections as editor 1986: Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry (editor), Melbourne, Collins Dove, 1986 (new edition, 1991) "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow" 1967 The Weatherboard Cathedral by Les Murray, Angus and Robertson, 1969, pp. 47–48 "The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle" 1976 The Herald, 7 September 1976 Ethnic Radio by Les Murray, Angus and Robertson, 1977, pp. 28–38 "The Quality of Sprawl" 1983 True North/Down Under no. 1 1983 The People's Otherworld: Poems by Les Murray, Angus and Robertson, 1983, pp. 28–29