Les Murray is an outstanding Australian poet of his generation and one of the foremost Australian literary critics. The author of seventeen volumes of verse, five books of literary essays, and many influential editions, he has for decades helped to shape the Australian literary landscape and has been one of the most authoritative literary voices in national debates of many kinds.

Leslie Allan Murray was born on 17 October 1938 in Nabiac, on the central coast of New South Wales, to Miriam (née Arnall) and Cecil Murray and was baptized in a Free Presbyterian ceremony at Bunyah, the village near which his parents farmed. Miriam had trained as a nurse in Newcastle, the nearest big city; Cecil Murray was a struggling dairy farmer whose 150 acres were owned by his domineering father. Murray was raised in a family home that was little more than a shed, with wooden walls...