Les Murray – January 22 2017

Les is a poet, anthologist and critic. Often called Australia’s Bush-bard, he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, two verse novels and has edited six poetry collections. His poetry has been influenced by the work of the Jindyworobaks, an Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. In addition to poetry, Les has written eight collections of prose. A short experimental film based on five of his poems was released in 2005. Les holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney. He was in the Royal Australian Navy Reserve and worked as a professional translator at the Australian National University before becoming a full-time writer. He has been editor of Poetry Australia, literary editor of Quadrant and poetry editor for Angus & Robertson. He has won many literary awards, including the Grace Leven Prize, the Petrarch Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 1999 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes. Les is an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to Australian literature.

Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Black Inc. Publishing, 2009; ISBN 9781863954471

“On the last day of 1985, I went home to live in Bunyah …. a move delayed [in 1981] by a family emergency, the diagnosis of autism in our fourth child. But now at last I was going home, to care for my father in his old age and to live in the place from which I’d always felt displaced. What I didn’t know was that I was heading home in order to go mad.” (Excerpt from the 2011 edition.) Since its first publication in 1997, hosts of readers have drawn insight from Les’s account of depression, its social effects and its origins in his family’s history. The 2009 edition includes a new afterword describing a relapse and sharing some of the fruits of his further contemplation. A further half dozen poems have been added, reflecting a more complex understanding of the disease and its role in the lives of its sufferers.

Subhuman Redneck Poems
Carcanet Poetry, 1996; ISBN 9781857542493

In this collection of poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of the sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray’s linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly perceptive, and fiercely honest, these poems surprise and bare the human in all of us. “Murray is at his strongest when he is simply observing and describing. Probably the most winning poem in the book is ‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’, which takes as its subject his autistic child and simply catalogues, with a real sense of expertise, the unusual ways in which the child behaves.” – John Redmond, poet, critic, assistant editor Thumbscrew magazine.