Guest of ilb 2004
Les Murray was born on a farm in Nabiac/New South
Wales, Australia, in 1938. As an only child he soon acquired
autodidactic habits. Following family tradition - a relative in
Scotland edited and wrote parts of the enormous Oxford English
Dictionary - the young Murray turned out to be highly gifted in all
language matters, though he was too dreamy and headstrong for an
academic career. After his studies he worked as translator at the
Australian National University in Canberra. In 1965, together
with Geoffrey Lehmann, he published his first volume of poetry, 'The
Ilex Tree', which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. In the
early 1970's Les Murray settled in Sydney as a freelance writer and
literary critic. Between 1973 and 1980 he worked as an editor of
'Poetry Australia', and later became the literary editor of the
magazine 'Quadrant'. As an often-awarded poet, Les Murray can
look back on an extensive poetic oeuvre distinguished by an enormous
diversity of themes, an extremely wide spectrum of poetic forms, and
great linguistic virtuosity. He combines, for example,
traditional lyrical forms of the western cultural area with the oral
culture of the Aborigines. Inspired by their long narrative
poems, he penned one hundred and forty sonnets for his first verse
novel, 'The Boys Who Stole a Funeral' (1979). For eight years,
from 1988 to 1996, Murray suffered from severe depression. During
this period, however, he produced some of his most important work: the
unique animal and nature poems 'Translations from the Natural World'
(1992), 'Subhuman Redneck Poems' (1993), a homage to simple people, and
the epic novel in verse, 'Fredy Neptune' (1998), which he describes as
his "cryptic autobiography". Fredy Neptune is traumatised having
been forced to witness an act of violence against Armenians.
Since then insensitive to pain and therefore superhumanly strong,
he has travelled around the world. About his relation to poetry,
Murray says, "The poetic experience seems, at bottom, to be an
experience of wholeness. If a poem is real, it is inexhaustible;
it cannot be summarised or transposed into other words. It is
marked by a strange simultaneity or stillness and racing
excitement." The novel was awarded the Prize of the Leipzig Book
Fair in 2005. Les Murray's most recent collection of poetry, "The
Biplane Houses", was published in 2006. The writer lives in Bunyah/New
South Wales.
© international literature festival berlin
Les Murray online: www.lesmurray.org | 
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