Murray Bail | |
|---|---|
 Bail in 2013 | |
| Born | (1941-09-22)22 September 1941 (age 83) Adelaide, South Australia, Australia |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Spouse | |
Murray Bail (born 22 September 1941)[1] is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. In 1980 he shared theAge Book of the Year award for his novelHomesickness.
He was born inAdelaide, South Australia, a son of Cyril Lindsay Bail (1914–1966). He has lived most of his life in Australia except for sojourns in India (1968–70) and England and Europe (1970–74). He lives in Sydney.
He was trustee of theNational Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981 and wrote a book on Australian artistIan Fairweather.
A portrait of Bail by the artistFred Williams[2] is hung in theNational Portrait Gallery inCanberra. The portrait was done while both Williams and Bail were Council members of the National Gallery of Australia.[2]
He is most well known forEucalyptus, which won theMiles Franklin Award in 1999. His other work includes the novelsHomesickness, which was a joint winner ofThe Age Book of the Year in 1980, andHolden's Performance, another award-winner. Reviewers recently compared Bail'sNotebooks 1970-2003 withProust,Gide andValéry's.The Pages [2008] was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. His latest novel,The Voyage, was released in November 2012.
Laurie Clancy suggests that Bail is, withPeter Carey andFrank 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. About the story ‘Portrait of Electricity’ from the collectionContemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975), Clancy says that "the story displays the strange mixture of surrealist fantasy and broad satire of Australian mores that characterizes all of Bail's work".[3]
After early success with short fiction, Bail turned to the novel as a form commensurate with his vision of life's complexity, which emerges in all its perplexing intricacy inHomesickness. This first novel describes the unscripted, global travels of a group of Australian tourists to diverse museums, real and imaginary. His next book,Holden's Performance, dealt more overtly with issues of national identity and the diverse forces that shape individual character. His later novels explored related issues in terms of a key binary: inEucalyptus, these are empirical knowledge and imagination, inThe Pages psychology and philosophy. Bail prides himself, rightly, on being a novelist of ideas, who is determined to be audacious in his creations and to challenge reader expectations and complacency.[citation needed]
The standard study of his work is Michael Ackland'sThe Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail (2012).
Bail is the second of four children. His father worked in the tramways and his mother was a homemaker. He attendedNorwood Technical High School.
Bail started working in advertising agencies in Adelaide and Melbourne. He and his first wife moved toIndia in 1968, where he worked in an advertising agency inBombay. He contractedamoebic dysentery on his travels, and went to London for treatment at theHospital for Tropical Diseases. There he decided the novel he had written in India was worthless, so he threw it in the garbage. He remained in London for five years, the first year on the dole, before returning to Australia in 1975.[4]
Bail has been married and divorced twice. He was first married in 1965, and divorced in 1988. His second wife was fellow writerHelen Garner, whom he married in 1992. They divorced in 1998.
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The Drover's Wife was used bySue Brooks for her 1984 short film.[5]
