Murray Bail

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Murray Bail is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction.

He was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 22 September 1941, and has lived most of his life in Australia except for sojourns in India (1968-1970) and England and Europe (1970-1974). He currently lives in Sydney.

He was also trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981, and wrote a book on Australian artist, Ian Fairweather.

A portrait of Bail by the artist Fred Williams[1] is hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The portrait was done while both Williams and Bail were Williams and Bail were Council members of the National Gallery of Australia.[1]

Contents

[edit] Career

He is most well known for his novel Eucalyptus which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1999. His other work includes the novels Homesickness, which was a joint winner of The Age Book of the Year in 1980, and Holden's Performance, another award-winner. Reviewers recently compared Bail's Notebooks 1970-2003 with Proust, Gide and Valery's.

Clancy[2] suggests that Bail is, with Peter Carey and Frank Moorhouse, one of the chief innovators in Australian short story writing, and that he was part of its revival in the 1970s. He notes that Bail is particularly interested in the relationship between language and reality and that this is evident in his early short stories. He says "the stories display the strange mixture of surrealist fantasy and broad satire of Australian mores that characterizes all of Bail's work".[2]

[edit] Awards

[edit] Works

[edit] Novels and short stories

  • Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975, republished in 1986 as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories
  • Homesickness (1980)
  • Holden's Performance (1987)
  • Eucalyptus (1998)
  • Camouflage : stories (2002)

[edit] Non-fiction

  • Ian Fairweather (1981)
  • Longhand: A Writer's Notebook (1989)
  • Notebooks 1970-2003 (2005)

[edit] Edited

  • The Faber book of contemporary Australian short stories (1988)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Murray Bail. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Retrieved on 2008-02-03.
  2. ^ a b Murray Bail Biography, by Laurie Clancy. J rank Biographies. Retrieved on 2008-02-03.

[edit] References

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