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Welcome
Les Murray is Australia's leading poet and one of the greatest
contemporary poets writing in English. His work has been published
in ten languages.
Les Murray has won many literary awards, including the Grace
Leven Prize (1980 and 1990), the Petrarch Prize (1995), and
the prestigious TS Eliot Award (1996). In 1999 he was awarded
the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation
of Ted Hughes.
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For A Quick Overview of Les Murray's work and significance
from 1965-1996, Mick Imrah and Lawrence Bourke provide a scholarly
place to start.
 Mick
Imrah (OUP, 1996)
Lawrence
Bourke (Routledge, 1994) 
A selection of Les Murray's poems short enough for comfortable
on-sceen reading forms the heart of this site:
Showcase
of Shorter Poems
Download
Showcase (PDF)
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 Les Murray RSS. For the very latest news on Les Murray, refer to the Les Murray News Feed.
A new edition of the Selected Poems is due out in October this year (Australia, Black Inc.)
The Biplane Houses is Les Murray's most recent original collection,
published in April 2006 (Australia, Black
Inc.) and September the same year (UK, Carcanet).
The title poem, "The Shining Slopes and Planes",
was published in 2005 in The
Quadrant.
The
Shining Slopes and Planes
Other
Poems from The Biplane Houses
The
Poetry Book Society recommend The Biplane Houses in its
most recent bulletin: "..Given his encyclopaedic memory,
his gargantuan appetite for language, and his acrobatic dance
in all forms of expression, this collection is as rich and
diverse as we would expect. Historically and geographically,
its reach is immense ... His concerns—the history of
white settlement and indigenous ancestry; the rural and the
urban; disinheritance; family—are addressed in poems
that range from the polemical and punning to the lyrical and
mythic." (Autumn Bulletin 2006, No. 210)
William Wootten, in his review for The Guardian, was struck by the stylistic variety of the collection: "Slipping from ancient to up to date, from high style to low puns, from the quietly contemplative to bravura flights of fancy, from satiric squibs to emotionally charged anecdotes, The Biplane Houses has styles aplenty." (October 21, 2006)
An article on The Mitchells was published
in The
English Review in November 2006; this was accompanied
by some recent remarks on the poem by Les Murray himself.
On
The Mitchells
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Hell and After (June 2005) is a prequel to Fivefathers,
which features Australian poets active from the 1930s to the
1960s. This "volume of epitomes" features work by
"four early English-language poets of Australia",
reaching as far back to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Poems
from Hell and After
Introduction
to Hell and After
In addition to the general introduction by Les Murray (above)
the book contains biographical introductions to each of the
four poets.
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Les Murray's poetry has so far been published in ten languages: German, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian and Dutch. Norwegian and Swedish translations of Fredy Neptune are also in the pipeline.
German Translations by Margitt Lehbert
Italian Translations by Mariadonata Villa
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The Full Dress was published in 2002:
'this book is an encounter between works of art held by the
National Gallery of Australia and poems or parts of poems
from my forty years of writing ... It's as if my life's work
and I went on a meander through the gallery's spaces, speaking
and listening to the art on display there.' (Les Murray)
More
on The Full Dress
The
Aboriginal Cricketer
Worker
Knowledge
Other Sample Pages
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The New Collected Poems were published in the UK in
February 2004 by Carcanet.
This follows the new Australian collected edition from Duffy
and Snellgrove, published August 2002.
Table
of Contents
The new editions include poems published between 1965 and
2002, adding Conscious and Verbal and Poems the Size of Photographs
to the list of source titles. The Australian edition is particularly
recommended, as it comes with a CD recording of Les Murray
reading 55 of the poems.
Uncollected
Poems
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Readings agents: in Australia please contact Margaret
Connolly, 061 2 9449 6342.
In the UK please contact Jean Waggoner, 01225 313715.
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