Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane
Born	(1939-02-25) 25 February 1939 Coburg, Victoria, Australia
Occupation	Author
Nationality	Australian
Notable works	The Plains (1982) Inland (1988) Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005)
Notable awards	Patrick White Award (1999) Melbourne Prize for Literature (2009) Prime Minister's Literary Awards (2018)

Gerald Murnane (born 25 February 1939) is an Australian novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Perhaps best known for his 1982 novel The Plains, he has won acclaim for his distinctive prose and exploration of memory, perception, identity and the Australian landscape, often blurring fiction and autobiography in the process. The New York Times described Murnane in 2018 as "the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of," and he is regularly tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has been richly praised by authors like J. M. Coetzee and Ben Lerner, and Teju Cole has called him “a genius on the level of Beckett”. The Sydney Morning Herald said, “No living Australian writer, not even Les Murray, has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction”.

Early life

Murnane was born in Coburg, a suburb of Melbourne in the Australian state of Victoria. He is one of four children. His brother had an intellectual disability, was repeatedly hospitalised and died in 1985. Parts of his childhood were spent in Bendigo and the Western District. In 1956 he graduated from De La Salle College, Malvern.

Murnane briefly trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1957. He abandoned this path, however, instead becoming a teacher in primary schools (from 1960 to 1968), and at the Victoria Racing Club's Apprentice Jockeys' School. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne in 1969, then worked in the Victorian Education Department until 1973. From 1980 he began to teach creative writing at various tertiary institutions.

Murnane married in 1966 and has three sons. In 1969 the family moved to the Melbourne suburb of Macleod.

After the death of his wife in 2009, Murnane moved to Goroke in country Victoria, living in a one-room studio next to his son's house.

Work

Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.

In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about an unnamed filmmaker who travels to "inner Australia", where he endeavours to film the plains under the patronage of wealthy landowners. The novel has been termed a fable, parable or allegory. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. It has been suggested that the book's opening features a narrator expressing an outlook that is typical to Murnane's writing:

Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.

The Plains was followed by Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005. These books are all concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.

2009 saw the release of Murnane's first work of fiction in over a decade, Barley Patch, which was followed by A History of Books in 2012 and A Million Windows in 2014. Will Heyward, in a review of A Million Windows for Music & Literature, suggests that these three latter works may be seen as a single, continuous project, containing "a form of fiction defined by a fragmentary style that avoids plot and characterization, and is instead narrated by association and the fugue-like repetition and variation of images."

In June 2018, his 2017 autobiographical novel Border Districts was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Although Murnane is primarily known within Australia, he does have a following in other countries, especially the US, Sweden and Germany. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice, Blum izdavaštvo 2025).

Tamarisk Row and Border Districts were published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2019.

Personal life and interests

Murnane was raised a Catholic and studied briefly for the priesthood. He is a passionate follower of horse racing, which often serves as a metaphor in his work, as well as a dedicated golfer. A documentary, Words and Silk – The Real and Imaginary Worlds of Gerald Murnane (1989), directed by Philip Tyndall, examined Murnane's childhood, work, approach to the craft of writing, and interest in horse racing. He is also an avid record-keeper and archivist.

He taught himself Hungarian after having read Gyula Illyés' People of the Puszta.

In June 2018 Murnane released a spoken word album, Words in Order. The centrepiece is a 1600-word palindrome written by Murnane, which he recites over a minimalist musical score. He also performs works by Thomas Hardy, Dezső Kosztolányi, DEVO and Killdozer.

Awards

• The Patrick White Award (1999).
• A Special Award in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards (2007).
• The Australia Council emeritus award (2008).
• The Melbourne Prize for Literature (2009)
• The Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature 2010 Award for Innovation in Writing
• A Million Windows short-listed for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Award for Fiction (2015)
• Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, 2016
• Prime Minister's Literary Awards for Fiction, for Border Districts, 2018.
• NSW Premier's Literary Awards, shortlisted: Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for Border Districts, 2019

Bibliography

Novels

• (1974) Tamarisk Row. William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne.
• (1976) A Lifetime on Clouds. William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne.
• (1982) The Plains. Norstrilia Press, Melbourne.
• (1988) Inland. William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne.
• (2009) Barley Patch. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.
• (2012) A History of Books. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.
• (2014) A Million Windows. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.
• (2017) Border Districts. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.
• (2019) A Season on Earth. Text Publishing, Melbourne. Unabridged edition of A Lifetime on Clouds

Short story collections

• (1985) Landscape with Landscape. Norstrilia Press, Melbourne.
• (1990) Velvet Waters. McPhee Gribble, Melbourne.
• (1995) Emerald Blue. McPhee Gribble, Melbourne.
• (2018) Collected Short Fiction. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney. Simultaneous release in the US as Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Collects the pieces in Velvet Waters and Emerald Blue, with the titular piece of Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, one uncollected short story, and three appended to A History of Books.

Essay collection

• (2005) Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.
• (2021) Last Letter to a Reader. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.

Poetry collection

• (2019) Green Shadows and Other Poems. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.

Memoir

• (2015) Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf. Text Publishing, Melbourne.

Further reading

• McNamee, Brendan, Grounded Visionary: The Mystic Fictions of Gerald Murnane. New York and Berlin: Peter Lang AG, 2019. ISBN 978-1433164712
• Stinson, Emmett, Murnane. Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2023.
• Uhlmann, Anthony, editor, Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2020.

External links

• Reading Gerald Murnane, at CONTEXT
• Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?, profile, 27 March 2018
• A lifetime journey into the geographies of the soul, interview, 14 November 2009.
• A world of his own, interview, 3 October 2009.
• The literary life of Gerald Murnane, 18 February 2008.
• A detrimental education, 30 June 2007.
• Speech at Monash University Archived 9 October 2010 at the Wayback Machine, 27 July 2006.
• An obsessive imagination, interview, 15 October 2005.
• When the mice failed to arrive, story.
• 2009 ABC interview about Murnane's Barley Patch.
• Biography at Golvan Arts website, Murnane's literary agent.
• Words in Order, album.