- Murray Bail
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Murray Bail (born 22 September 1941) is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction.
He was born in Adelaide, South Australia. He has lived most of his life in Australia except for sojourns in India (1968–70) and England and Europe (1970–74). He currently lives in Sydney.
He was trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981, and wrote a book on Australian artist Ian Fairweather.
A portrait of Bail by the artist Fred Williams[1] is hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The portrait was done while both Williams and Bail were Council members of the National Gallery of Australia.[1]
Contents
Career
He is most well known for his novel Eucalyptus which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1999. His other work includes the novels Homesickness, which was a joint winner of The Age Book of the Year in 1980, and Holden's Performance, another award-winner. Reviewers recently compared Bail's Notebooks 1970-2003 with Proust, Gide and Valery's.
Clancy[2] suggests that Bail is, with Peter Carey and Frank Moorhouse, one of the chief innovators in Australian short story writing, and that he was part of its revival in the 1970s. He notes that Bail is particularly interested in the relationship between language and reality and that this is evident in his early short stories. He says "the stories display the strange mixture of surrealist fantasy and broad satire of Australian mores that characterizes all of Bail's work".[2]
Awards
- 1980: The Age Book of the Year, joint winner for Homesickness with David Ireland's Woman of the Future
- 1980: National Book Council Award for Homesickness
- 1988: Victorian Premier's Literary Award Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction for Holden's Performance
- 1998: ALS Gold Medal for Eucalyptus
- 1999: Miles Franklin Award for Eucalyptus
- 1999: Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Eucalyptus
Bibliography
Novels
- Homesickness (1980)
- Holden's Performance (1987)
- Eucalyptus (1998)
- The Pages (2008)
Short story collections
- Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975, republished in 1986 as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories
- Camouflage : stories (2002)
Non-fiction
- Ian Fairweather (1981)
- Longhand: A Writer's Notebook (1989)
- Notebooks 1970-2003 (2005)
Edited
- The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories (1988)
Notes
- ^ a b "Murray Bail". National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Archived from the original on 2007-08-31. http://web.archive.org/web/20070831190549/http://www.portrait.gov.au/static/coll_1345Murray+Bail.php. Retrieved 2008-02-03.
- ^ a b "Murray Bail Biography, by Laurie Clancy". J rank Biographies. http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4118/Bail-Murray.html. Retrieved 2008-02-03.
References
- Australian authors: Murray Bail Accessed: 2007-11-16
- Clancy, Laurie Murray Bail Biography Accessed: 2007-11-16
- Murray Bail at the complete review Accessed: 2007-09-19
Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best Book Winners 1987–1989 Olive Senior (1987) · Festus Iyayi (1988) · Janet Frame (1989)
1990–1999 Mordecai Richler (1990) · David Malouf (1991) · Rohinton Mistry (1992) · Alex Miller (1993) · Vikram Seth (1994) · Louis de Bernières (1995) · Rohinton Mistry (1996) · Earl Lovelace (1997) · Peter Carey (1998) · Murray Bail (1999)
2000–2009 J. M. Coetzee (2000) · Peter Carey (2001) · Richard Flanagan (2002) · Austin Clarke (2003) · Caryl Phillips (2004) · Andrea Levy (2005) · Kate Grenville (2006) · Lloyd Jones (2007) · Lawrence Hill (2008) · Christos Tsiolkas (2009)
2010–2019 Rana Dasgupta (2010) · TBD (2011)
Categories:- 1941 births
- Living people
- Australian novelists
- Australian short story writers
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