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.
For an overview of Les Murray's work and significance from 1965-1994, please refer to that provided by The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature:
A selection of Les Murray's poems short enough for comfortable on-sceen reading forms the heart of this site:
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 2006 (Black Inc., in Australia Carcanet in the UK). The title poem, "The Shining Slopes and Planes", was published in 2005 in The Quadrant.
The Shining Slopes and Planes & Other Poems
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, accompanied by some recent remarks on the poem by Les Murray himself.
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.
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.
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
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
Les Murray: A Life in Progress by Peter Alexander was published in 2000 by the Oxford University Press. Over 3500 copies were sold in the first three days. The author has kindly given permission for three substantial extracts to appear on this site.
Forgiving the Victim (1996-1998)
A good quality overview of the poet's life is also available.
Brief Biography by Peter Alexander
In 2001 The National Portait Gallery, Canberra, acquired David Naseby's recent portrait of Les Murray:
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.
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.
During a visit to Sweden in 2007 Les Murray recorded Translations from Nature. The CD comprises 36 of the 40 poems from the 1992 sequence Presence: Translations From the Natural World and is available from Edition Rugerup.
The Poetry Archive, a UK-based initiative headed by Andrew Motion, recorded Les Murray in 2001. The CD, available from the Poetry Bookshop, includes 55 poems, seven of which may be listened to free online: The Tin Wash Dish, Bats' Ultrasound, The Last Hellos, The Annals of Sheer, The Pay for Fosterage, The Climax of Factory Farming and The Meaning of Existence.
Listen to Les Murray Online: Audio Links
Les Murray delivered a lengthier discourse on poetry for the 1998 Rotterdam festival:
Poems the Size of Photographs, Les Murray's 2002 poetry volume, is published by Duffy and Snellgrove (Australia) and Carcanet (UK).
'A collection of brief, humourous and insightful poems ... An accessible and beautiful book' – The Poetry Book Society.
Les Murray and Australian Poetry, a collection of essays, was published in 2002 by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies of Kings College, London. This includes an essay by Les Murray entitled 'How Fred and I wrote Fredy Neptune'.
"The Agony of Being Unclothed ..." Ruth Padel's best selling new book, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, contains an informed close-reading of Les Murray's sonnet, On Home Beaches: