Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane (born 25 February 1939) is an Australian novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. He has won acclaim for his distinctive prose and exploration of memory, perception, identity and the Australian landscape, often blurring fiction and autobiography in the process. Murnane has published 14 books between 1974 and 2021, perhaps his best-known being the 1982 novel The Plains. Murnane is now considered to be one of Australia's greatest writers with a substantial international reputation, after finding a larger readership only since the 2000s. The New York Times described Murnane in 2018 as "the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of". The Sydney Morning Herald wrote in 2014: "No living Australian writer, not even Les Murray, has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction". Murnane's work has been richly praised by international authors like J. M. Coetzee, Jon Fosse and Ben Lerner, and Teju Cole has called him "a genius on the level of Beckett". He is regularly tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.