This collection of essays leads the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classics Border Districts and Tamarisk Row, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.Delicately argued and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life.
Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1939. He is the author of fifteen books, only one of which was published in the UK before And Other Stories started to publish him here in 2019 with his first book Tamarisk Row and his most latest work of prose, Border Districts. In 2020 And Other Stories publish his collected stories, Stream System, as well as a collection of his essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, though it can be hard to separate story and essay in his writing. He has won multiple high-profile awards across Australia including, most recently, the 2018 Prime Minister's Award for Border Districts. He lives in the remote village of Goroke in the north-west of Victoria, near the border with South Australia. |
