Brief Biography

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941, and has lived the bulk of his life in Australia aside from stints in India in 1968 to 1970, and England and Europe from 1970 to 1974.

Bail's first novel, Homesickness, won the National Book Council Award and shared The Age Book of the Year award with David Ireland's Woman of the Future. His subsequent long silence was ended with the publication of Holden's Performance which won the Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction.

For five years Bail was a Trustee of the Australian National Gallery and in 1981 produced a book on the Australian artist Ian Fairweather.

Bail's most recent novel, Eucalyptus won both the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Award.

Murray Bail currently lives in Sydney.

Bibliography

Short Story Collections
Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories 1975 (republished in 1986 as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories)

Edited Short Story Collections
The Faber Book of Contemporary Short Stories 1988

Non-Fiction
Ian Fairweather 1981
Longhand: A Writer's Notebook 1989

This page and its contents are copyright © 1999-2002 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: April 29, 2001.