RIP Les Murray, Australia's Typewriting Poet Laureate (1938-2019)

Les Murray, the Bush Bard of Bunyah and Australia's unofficial Poet Laureate, died today at a nursing home at Taree in New South Wales, aged 80. One of his peers said tonight that Murray was not just Australia's greatest poet, but its greatest writer in any literary genre. He had used a Brother portable typewriter for many years.

Leslie Allan Murray (1938-2019) was a poet, anthologist and critic. His career spanned more than 40 years and he published 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. His poetry won many awards and he was rated by the National Trust of Australia as one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures. In 2007, Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker that Murray was "now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets". Murray was often talked of as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.