Murray Bail

Murray Bail (born 22 September 1941) is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. In 1980 he shared the Age Book of the Year award for his novel Homesickness.

He was born in Adelaide, South Australia, a son of Cyril Lindsay Bail (1914–1966). He has lived most of his life in Australia except for sojourns in India (1968–70), England and Europe (1970–74). He lives in Sydney.

He was trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981 and wrote a book on Australian artist Ian Fairweather.

A portrait of Bail by the artist Fred Williams is hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The portrait was done while both Williams and Bail were Council members of the National Gallery of Australia.

After early success with short fiction, Bail turned to the novel as a form commensurate with his vision of life's complexity, which emerges in all its perplexing intricacy in Homesickness. This first novel describes the unscripted, global travels of a group of Australian tourists to diverse museums, real and imaginary. His next book, Holden's Performance, dealt more overtly with issues of national identity and the diverse forces that shape individual character. His later novels explored related issues in terms of a key binary: in Eucalyptus, these are empirical knowledge and imagination, and in The Pages psychology and philosophy. Bail prides himself on being a novelist of ideas, who is determined to be audacious in his creations and to challenge reader expectations and complacency.

The standard study of his work is Michael Ackland's The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail (2012).

Personal life Bail is the second of four children. His father worked in the tramways and his mother was a homemaker. He attended Norwood Technical High School.

Bail started working in advertising agencies in Adelaide and Melbourne. He and his first wife moved to India in 1968, where he worked in an advertising agency in Bombay. He contracted amoebic dysentery on his travels, and went to London for treatment at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. There he decided the novel he had written in India was worthless, so he threw it in the garbage. He remained in London for five years, the first year being spent on the dole, before returning to Australia in 1975.

Bail has been married and divorced twice. He was first married in 1965, and divorced in 1988. His second wife was fellow writer Helen Garner, whom he married in 1992. They divorced in 1998.

Awards 1980: The Age Book of the Year, joint winner for Homesickness with David Ireland's Woman of the Future 1980: National Book Council Award for Homesickness 1988: Victorian Premier's Literary Award Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction for Holden's Performance 1998: ALS Gold Medal for Eucalyptus 1999: Miles Franklin Award for Eucalyptus 1999: Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Eucalyptus