Gerald Murnane (born 25 February 1939)[1] is an Australian novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist.
Perhaps best known for his 1982 novel The Plains,[2] he has won acclaim for his distinctive prose and exploration of memory, identity, and the Australian landscape, often blurring fiction and autobiography in the process.
The New York Times described Murnane in 2018 as "the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of," and he is regularly tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne in 1969, then worked in the Victorian Education Department until 1973.
[5]: 192 Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence.
[6][7] The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons.
2009 saw the release of Murnane's first work of fiction in over a decade, Barley Patch, which was followed by A History of Books in 2012 and A Million Windows in 2014.
Will Heyward, in a review of A Million Windows for Music & Literature, suggests that these three latter works may be seen as a single, continuous project, containing "a form of fiction defined by a fragmentary style that avoids plot and characterization, and is instead narrated by association and the fugue-like repetition and variation of images.