Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane was born in Coburg, a northern suburb of Melbourne, in 1939. He spent some of his childhood in country Victoria before returning to Melbourne in 1949 where he lived for the next sixty years. He has left Victoria only a handful of times and has never been on an aeroplane.

In 1957 Murnane began training for the Catholic priesthood but soon abandoned this in favour of becoming a primary-school teacher. He also taught at the Apprentice Jockeys’ School run by the Victoria Racing Club. In 1969 he graduated in arts from Melbourne University. He worked in education for a number of years and later became a teacher of creative writing.

In 1966 Murnane married Catherine Lancaster. They had three sons. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, and was followed by eight other works of fiction. His most recent book is A History of Books. He has also published a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005).

In 1999 Gerald Murnane won the Patrick White Award. In 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. In the same year, after the death of his wife, Murnane moved to Goroke in the north-west of Victoria.

‘Reading Murnane, one cares less about what is happening in the story and more about what one is thinking about as one reads. The effect of his writing is to induce images in the reader’s own mind, and to hold the reader inside a world in which the reader is at every turn encouraged to turn his or her attention to those fast flocking images.’ New York Times

Paris Review attends the ‘Another World in this One’ Murnane symposium
Sydney Review of Books: Gerald Murnane’s conference paper from the Murnane symposium
New York Times: Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?
New York Times: Two New Books From Australia, Unconstrained by Literary Convention
Guardian: Gerald Murnane: one of Australia's greatest writers you may never have heard of.
Guardian: ‘It’s uncanny’: acclaim at last for Gerald Murnane, lost genius of Australian letters
Australian: Writer Gerald Murnane and his private world in Goroke, Victoria ($)
El Pais (Español)
Monthly ($)
New Yorker: The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters
Meanjin: The Typescript Stops Here (op-ed)