Mr. Murray possessed “a fierce moral vision and a sensuous musicality,” the poet Meghan O’Rourke wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 2011, and “in his most intimate poems, reminds us of the power of literature to transubstantiate grievance into insight.”
Mr. Murray was a voracious reader, a self-taught translator of many languages, a genial conversationalist and a walking dictionary. His mother died suddenly when he was young, and his life was marked by poverty and bouts of depression, but he found joy in poetry, nature’s splendor and Roman Catholicism, to which he converted in his mid-20s.
“He was an extraordinary mixture of a sort of slightly autistic bloke from the bush and, at the same time, one of the most intelligent and creative people that you’d ever known,” one of his publishers, Michael Duffy, said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Murray’s renown spread outside Australia in the 1990s. He won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize in Britain in 1996 for his collection “Subhuman Redneck Poems” and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998.
Les Murray, Australia’s Unofficial Poet Laureate, Is Dead at 80
A prolific poet who some said deserved a Nobel Prize, he courted controversy and was always, his biographer said, “on the side of the outcast.”https://t.co/zpiZz0uPXK https://t.co/Le97J2CWi9— Allison (@Londied41) May 3, 2019