Les Murray: Killing the Black Dog

Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray’s courageous account of his struggle with depression, accompanied by poems specially selected by the author. Since the first edition appeared in 1997, hosts of readers have drawn insight from his account of the disease, its social effects and its origins in his family’s history. As Murray writes in [...]

Les Murray: The Farm Terraces

A new poem by Les Murray. The Farm Terraces Beautiful merciless work around the slopes of Earth terraces cut by curt hoe at the orders of hunger or a pointing lord. Levels eyed up to rhyme copied from grazing animals round the steeps of Earth, balconies filtering water down stage to stage of drop. Wind-stirred [...]

Les Murray: The Bronze Bull

Les Murray’s take on the current world financial crisis. The Bronze Bull Went down to Wall Street and the Bull it was gone the mighty bronze one squat lord of Wall Street. A year and a half before the subprime not even a calf wore bronze on that small street, some skyscrapers may have. Squared [...]

Les Murray ‘translated’

Les Murray is to be a guest at the 2008 Gothenburg Book Fair, the largest book fair in Scandinavia, which will run from September 25-28. Les will talk about his life and his writing with some of his translators, including Jonas Ellerstrom. Jonas has just translated Les’s Killing the Black Dog,  an essay about depression [...]

Les Murray: King Lear had Alzheimers

Les Murray has recently been made a visiting professor at the University of Sydney, where he works as a consultant on the Macquarie Dictionary. King Lear had Alzheimers is a new poem which he has written.

Les Murray — Nobel Prize odds

From a recent news report: The Swedish Academy announced on Friday that the 2007 Nobel Laureate for Literature will be named this Thursday, October 11, at 1pm Stockholm time. Odds-makers [are] tipping well-tried names to take a prize that often goes to the obscure or controversial. One British bookmaker ranks the favorites in this order: [...]

Les Murray: Selected Poems

“There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broadleafed in its pleasures and yet so intimate and conversational.” —Derek Walcott, 1992 Nobel Prize winner Selected Poems is the latest, completely up-to-date collection of Les Murray’s poetry. It comprises what Murray himself considers his most successfully realised poems, drawn [...]

Les Murray: The Biplane Houses

The Biplane Houses is Les Murray’s first new volume of poems since 2002’s Poems the Size of Photographs. In it we find Australia’s unofficial poet laureate at his near-miraculous best. The collection exhibits both Murray’s unfailing grace as a writer and his ability to write in any voice, style and genre: there are story poems, [...]

Les Murray: The Ashes

Les Murray is leaving shortly on a reading tour which takes in, among other countries, Denmark and Sweden. His latest poem includes references to the late John Gorton and to the poet Lex Banning (1921-65), who suffered from cerebral palsy. THE ASHES a times b marks the spot where my maths hit the wall. It [...]