Translations from the Natural World

Les A. Murray was born Leslie Allan Murray in Australia on October 17, 1938. He was a poet, anthologist, and critic. His career spanned more than forty years, and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. His early work was published in Honi Soit and the literary journal Southerly. His first book, The Ilex Tree written with Geoffrey Lehmann, was published in 1965. Murray's first solo collection, The Weatherboard Cathedral, was published in 1969. In the early 1970s, he stopped working as a public servant to write poetry full-time.

His works included An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow, Waiting for the Past, On Bunyah, New Selected Poems, Learning Human, Conscious and Verbal, The Biplane Houses, Poems the Size of Photographs, Taller When Prone, and Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression. He received the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for Dog Fox Field in 1990, the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for Translations from the Natural World in 1993, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems in 1996, and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He edited the journal Poetry Australia from 1973 until 1979, was a poetry editor for Angus & Robertson from 1976 to 1990, and was the literary editor of Quadrant from 1991 to 2018. He was awarded an Order of Australia. He died after a long illness on April 29, 2019 at the age of 80.

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