OUR CLIENTS
Gerald Murnane
Adult Fiction Author
Gerald was born in Melbourne in 1939. He spent part of his childhood in country districts of Victoria, moved back to Melbourne in 1949 and has rarely left since. He is the author of seven books of fiction. The first, Tamarisk Row (1974), was reprinted in February 2008 in a new edition by Giramondo Publishing. This was followed by A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), The Plains (1982, also published in the USA by George Braziller in 1985), Landscape with Landscape (1985), Inland (1988, also published in Sweden by Brutus Ostlings Bokforlag Symposion in 1995), Velvet Waters (1990, also published in Italian by CIS Publishers in 1994) and Emerald Blue (1995). Many of Gerald’s books were finalists for various Australian literary prizes and Velvet Waters won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Barbara Ramsden Award. Gerald won a special prize at the 2007 NSW Premiers Awards and, along with Christopher Koch, he won the 2008 Writers' Emeritus Award from the Australia Council.
Reviewers and critics have differed sharply over Gerald’s fiction, however it is highly regarded by academics. His first book, Tamarisk Row, was described in Nation Review as the best novel to have appeared in Australia for many years. Another reviewer found it unreadable. Gerald was once described in the Australian as the most original Australian writer of his generation. He has also been called ‘flawed and repetitious’. His most widely read book, The Plains, was called by one critic ‘a classic of our literature’ and by another, ‘nonsense’. It is studied at a number of Australian Universities.
Gerald and some of his writing were the subject of a film, Words and Silk, which won first prize from among twenty-seven international entries in the category “Documentary Artist Profile” at the San Francisco Film Festival of 1991.
Gerald won the Patrick White Award in November 1999 at a stage when none of his books was in print in Australia. This award is presented annually to a writer whose work, in the opinion of the judges, “has not received adequate recognition”. Text Publishing righted this wrong by releasing The Plains in 2001. It was published in the USA in 2003 by Western Michigan University with a Foreword by Andrew Zawacki. It was also published as Slatterna in Sweden in 2005 by Albert Bonniers Forlag. The Swedish translation was by Caj Lundgren. Albert Bonniers Ferlag will also publish Velvet Waters in Swedish in the Northern Spring of 2008.
‘Gerald Murnane's writing has inspired a number of interpretations, studies and close readings, actually not very different from the kind of near-sighted scrutiny that the inhabitants of the plains excel in, giving rise to a variety of contradictory theories and groupings. The author, as it were, comments and parodies in advance his future critics, and the critical essay on The Plains is in its own way already incorporated in it. This is not as complicated as it sounds. Murnane may be a demanding and utterly thought-provoking writer, but he is not difficult to read. Of course one can read the story just as it is, full of feeling, poetic and evasive, a description of an enigmatic parallel world quite close to our own. Murnane's style is breathtakingly beautiful. The language is both crystal clear and dreamlike. Irresistibly it draws the reader into the suggestive inner landscape that the continually working film-maker never manages - or wants to - grasp.’
~ Svenska Dagbladet 20 May 2005
‘In Gerald Murnane's novel there is an eccentric will to understand, a yearning, a passion that adds magic to the rest.’
~ Dagens Nyheter 20 May 2005
‘Trying a strictly allegorical reading makes you feel idiotic. Murnane obviously wants to mirror and mock the imaginative power and conceit of so-called civilized and cultured people.’
~ Pia Bergstrom 30 June 2005
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, A collection of essays was published in 2005 by Giramondo Publishing. Albert Bonniers Forlag are published the title essay from this collection, about Proust, in both Swedish and English in a catalogue type publication to accompany an Art Exhibition in Stockholm in the Northern Autumn of 2007.
In October 2006, Gerald emerged as a contender for the world's most significant literary prize, the Nobel. According to British bookmaker Ladbrokes, he was 33/1 to be named the 2006 laureate. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (who had been listed by Ladbrokes as 5/2 favourite) was in fact the winner and received his prize in Stockholm in December.
GOLVAN ARTS MANAGEMENT • PO Box 766, Kew, Victoria 3101 Australia • golvan@ozemail.com.au