Today is the birthday of two of Australia's greatest writers: Sumner Locke Elliot and Les Murray.
Sumner Locke Elliot was born in Sydney on this day in 1917. The son of writer Sumner Locke, he is probably best known for his 1963 novel Careful He Might Hear You which won the Miles Franklin
award and which was later made into a film in 1983, featuring Wendy Hughes and Robyn Nevin, and directed by Carl Schulz. Elliot emigrated to the USA in 1949 where he died in 1991. He was presented with the Patrick White Award in 1977.
Les Murray was born in Nabiac, New South Wales, in 1938. He graduated from the University of Sydney, worked and travelled widely before deciding on a freelance writing career in 1971. He is best known for his poetry which is known world-wide, with such volumes as The People's Otherword, Fredy Neptune and Subhuman Redneck Poems. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998 on the recommendation of Ted Hughes, he was proclaimed an Australian Living Treasure in 1998, and is an Officer of the Order of Australia. Perpetually rumoured to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize, he lives near Bunyah in New South Wales, only a few kilometres from where he grew up.
