Murray, Les(lie) A(llan) (1938– )

Australian poet. His adventurous, verbally inventive, and deeply serious poetry has appeared in collections such as The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961–1981 (1982), Translations from the Natural World (1993), and Poems the Size of Photographs (2002). His writing extols the virtues and values of rural life. His collection Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) won the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry in 1997, and he won the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry in 1999.

Born in a rural area on the coast of New South Wales, he was lured to the city as a student at Sydney University and worked as an academic translator in Canberra. Other poetry collections are The People's Otherworld (1983), The Australian Seasons (1985), and Learning Human and Conscious and Verbal (both 1999). His other works include A Working Forest, selected essays (1996); Freddy Neptune, a verse novel (1998); and The Quality of Sprawl, selected essays about Australia (1999).