Les Murray

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

Poem Against Economics
Angus & Robertson
Sydney, 1972

The Boys Who Stole the Funeral
Angus & Robertson
Sydney, 1979

The Vernacular Republic: poems 1961-1981
Angus & Robertson
Sydney, 1982

The people’s otherworld
Angus & Robertson
London, 1983

Persistence in Folly
Sirius
London, 1984

The Australian Year
Angus & Robertson
North Ryde, 1985

Selected Poems
Carcanet
Manchester, 1986

The Daylight Moon
Carcanet
London, 1988

The Idyll Wheel
Officina Brindabella
Canberra,1989

Blocks and Tackles: articles and essays 1982-1990
Angus & Robertson
London, 1990

Dog Fox Field
Carcanet
London, 1991

The Paperbark Tree
Carcanet
Manchester, 1992

Translation from the Natural World
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York, 1994

Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Regenbogen
Hanser
München, 1996
Übersetzung: Margitt Lehbert

Subhuman Redneck Poems
Duffy & Snellgrove
Sydney, 1996

A Working Forest
Duffy & Snellgrove
Potts Point, 1997

The Quality of Sprawl
Duffy & Snellgrove
Sydney, 1999

Conscious & Verbal
Duffy & Snellgrove
Sydney, 1999

Learning Human
Carcanet
Manchester, 2001

Poems the Size of Photographs
Duffy & Snellgrove
Sydney, 2002

Collected Poems
Duffy & Snellgrove
Sydney, 2002

The Full Dress
National Gallery of Australia
Canberra, 2002

New Collected Poems
Carcanet
Manchester, 2003

Fredy Neptune
Ammann
Zürich, 2004
Übersetzung: Thomas Eichhorn

Traumbabwe
Ammann
Zürich, 2005
Übersetzung: Margitt Lehbert

Gedichte, groß wie Photos
Edition Rugerup
Hörby/Schweden, 2006
Übersetzung: Margitt Lehbert

The Biplane Houses
Carcanet
Manchester, 2006

Übersetzer: Thomas Eichhorn, Margitt Lehbert