Gerald Murnane
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Gerald Murnane (born February 25, 1939) is an Australian writer.
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[edit] Life
Murnane was born in Coburg, Melbourne, and has almost never left the state of Victoria. Parts of his childhood were spent in Bendigo and the Western District.
He 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.
In 1969 Murnane moved to the Melbourne suburb of Macleod, where he has lived ever since.
He married in 1966 and has three children.
[edit] Work
Murnane's first two novels, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), are semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but utterly grammatical sentences.
In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia. The novel is a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality. It 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. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.
As of early 2006, Murnane was reported to be working on a new work of fiction, and to have archived work for publication after certain unnamed people had died.
Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004. He was the winner of the Patrick White Award in 1999.
[edit] Interests
Murnane is an avid follower of horseracing, which often serves as a metaphor in his work. A documentary, Words and Silk (1989), directed by Philip Tyndall, examined Murnane's childhood, work, approach to the craft of writing, and interest in horseracing.
He also taught himself to read Hungarian, which he continues to do.
[edit] Books
- Tamarisk Row (1974)
- A Lifetime on Clouds (1976)
- The Plains (1982)
- Landscape With Landscape (1985)
- Inland (1988)
- Velvet Waters (1990)
- Emerald Blue (1995)
- Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005)
[edit] External links
- Speech at Monash University 27 July 2006
- An obsessive imagination Interview, 15 October 2005
- When the mice failed to arrive Story
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Murnane, Gerald |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Contemporary Australian novelist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 25, 1939 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
