Fivefathers

Murray Les

"This book", writes Les Murray, "presents to British and European readers selections from the work of five leading Australian poets of the generation before mine". They are, with Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and Gwen Harwood-who are happily available in British editions-key figures in "a Golden Age of Australian poetry which paradoxically coincided with its greatest marginalisation".

Murray's characteristically vivid and emphatic introductory essays to the poets, of whom he is in a real sense himself made, as heir and successor, and his "essential" selections from their work, and he suggests why their accomplishments have been eclipsed in the wider bourse of English-language literary reputations. The Academy has much to answer for, yet the freedom the poets enjoyed was partly a result of their very neglect by institutions.

Murray strikes effectively against "that imperial trap of exclusion", making the available map of our century's poetry larger and much richer.

About the Author

Les Murray was born in 1938 and grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales, where he still lives. He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister's Department. His real vocation was poetry, however, and from 1971 he has made literature his full-time career. He was the first Australian poet to achieve international acclaim without expatriation. Murray first visited Europe in the sixties, and has returned frequently since then to give poetry readings.

Carcanet publish his "Collected Poems" and his "New Selected Poems" (2012), as well as his individual collections, including "Subhuman Redneck Poems" (1966, awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize) and "The Biplane Houses" (2006), and his essays and prose writings in "The Paperbark Tree" (1992). His verse novel "Fredy Neptune" appeared in 1998 and in 2004 won the Mondello Prize in Italy and a major German award at the Leipzig Book Fair. He also edited "The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010".

Murray has special links with Scotland, and his Scots ancestors, whilst remaining an important and distinctive Australian writer. Blake Morrison, writing in the "Independent on Sunday", called Murray: "one of the finest poets writing in English today, one of the super league which includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky", and C. K. Stead said of his poetry in the "London Review of Books": "It is wonderfully disciplined writing, offering what poetry and nothing else can offer, an art that arrests one's otherwise ever frustrated sense of the richness of the life that lives only for the moment".

In 1994 Murray was nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry and in June 1999 he was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at Buckingham Palace, an honour was recommended by the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.

Reviews

Awards won by Les Murray
1994 nomination for the Oxford Chair of Poetry
1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for the best collection (Subhuman Redneck Poems)
1999 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry

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