Murray Bail (b. 1941), writer, was born in Adelaide and spent several years in India and England in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In London, he began contributing pieces to the Transatlantic Review and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book of short stories, Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories, was published in England in 1975, and reissued in 1986 as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories. His first novel Homesickness (1980) won the National Book Council Award and shared the Age Book of the Year Award; Holden's Performance (1987) won the 1988 Victorian Premier's Award for fiction. A trustee of the National Gallery of Australia for five years from 1976, Bail wrote a lyrical monograph on the artist Ian Fairweather in 1981, which was republished with significant revisions, including four extra chapters, in 2009. Described as 'one of our most remarkable fabulists', Bail has won critical acclaim and a number of major Australian literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Award for the beguiling Eucalyptus (1998), the story of a young woman whose prospective suitors must prove themselves by naming every species of eucalypt on her father's property. His subsequent novels include The Pages (2008) and The Voyage (2012). Bail's short fiction has been published regularly in journals such as Meanjin and the New Yorker, and his output in non-fiction includes Longhand: A Writer's Notebook (1989) and Notebooks 1970–2003 (2005). His collection of autobiographical writings, He, was published in 2021.
