Murray, Les (1938-2019), was one of Australia’s leading poets. He compiled The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986, expanded 1991 and 1996). The best-known volume of Murray’s own work, The Vernacular Republic, Poems 1961-1981, was published in 1982, with an update in 1986. Much of his verse shows the poet’s identification with Aboriginal culture and the Australian rural landscape. Murray wrote in a meditative, lyrical style. The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1979) consists of 140 sonnets about two boys who steal a body from a Sydney funeral home so they can bury it in the dead man’s native outback (Australia’s rural interior).
Leslie Allan Murray was born on Oct. 17, 1938, in Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales. He graduated from the University of Sydney, where he edited the magazine Honi Soit. He later worked as a translator at the Australian National University before becoming a full-time writer in 1971. He edited Poetry Australia from 1973 to 1979. Murray was writer-in-residence at numerous universities, including the University of New England in the United States.
Murray’s book The People’s Otherworld (1983) was awarded an Australian Literature Society Gold Medal by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in 1984. The same year, he received the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Literature. Two of his works—The Daylight Moon (1987) and Dog Fox Field (1990)—were the annual choices of the United Kingdom’s Poetry Society. Collections of Murray’s poems include Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), Learning Human (2000), Conscious and Verbal (2001), Poems the Size of Photographs (2004), and New Selected Poems (2014). His other works include Translations from the Natural World (1992), Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression (1997), Fredy Neptune (1998), and Taller When Prone (2010). His essays on Australia were collected in The Paperbark Tree (1992). Murray died on April 29, 2019.
