Language English Name Morris Lurie Nationality Australian Role Writer | Ethnicity Polish-Jewish Education RMIT University Period 1966–2014 Parents Esther Lurie, Arie Lurie | |
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Born 30 October 1938
Carlton, Victoria, Australia ( 1938-10-30 ) Alma mater Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Notable awards Patrick White Award (2006) Died October 8, 2014, Wantirna, Australia Movies Cactus, Two Brothers Running Books The Twenty‑seventh Annual Af, Hergesheimer in the Present T, To Light Attained: A Novel: Ea, The Story of Imelda - Who Was, Running nicely Similar People Nina Bawden, Bob Ellis, Paul Cox, Ted Robinson, Norman Kaye | ||
Morris Lurie (30 October 1938 – 8 October 2014) was an Australian writer of comic novels, short stories, essays, plays, and children's books. His work focused on the comic mishaps of Jewish-Australian men (often writers) of Lurie's generation, who are invariably jazz fans.
Contents
Biography
Lurie was born in 1938 to Arie and Esther Lurie (Jewish emigrants from Poland) at the Royal Women's Hospital in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne. He was schooled at Elwood Central School, Prahran Technical School and Melbourne High School, and then studied architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology before working in advertising.
His first novel was the comic Rappaport (Hodder and Stoughton, 1966) and focused on a day in the life of a young Melbourne antique dealer and his immature friend, Friedlander. The characters, transplanted to London, were further chronicled in Rappaport's Revenge (1973). Lurie's self-exile from Australia to Europe, the UK and Northern Africa provides much of the material for his fiction. His second novel was The London Jungle Adventures of Charlie Hope (Hodder and Stoughton, 1968). Flying Home (1978) was named by the National Book Council as one of the ten best Australian books of the decade. Subsequent novels are Seven Books for Grossman (1983)—really a novella parodying the styles of various authors—and Madness (1991), about a writer dealing with a mentally unstable girlfriend.
Lurie is best known for his short stories. In 2000 he wrote an instructional guide When and How to Write Short Stories and What They Are. His stories have been published in many prestigious magazines, including The New Yorker, The Virginia Quarterly, Punch, The Times, The Telegraph Magazine, Transatlantic Review, Island, Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant and Westerly.
In his 2008 novel, To Light Attained, Lurie deals with the subject of suicide. A review of the novel described it as "a father's anguish in words".
Lurie succumbed to cancer on 8 October 2014, at the Wantirna Hospice.
Awards
Works
Novels and short story collections
Essays and journalism
Other books include a collection of plays called Waterman (1979); an autobiography Whole Life (1987); and a number of children's books, including the popular Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race (1969), which schoolchildren in Victoria voted their favourite young storybook by an Australian author.