Morris Lurie is an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n writer of comic novels, short stories, essays, plays, and children's books. His work focuses on the comic mishaps of Jewish-Australian men (often writers) of Lurie's generation, who are invariably jazz fans.

Biography

Lurie was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1938, to Arie and Esther Lurie. His first novel was the comic Rappaport (Hodder and Stoughton, 1966) and focused with 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. He recently wrote an instructional guide When and How to Write Short Stories and What They Are (2000). He has been published in many prestigious magazines including The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, The Virginia Quarterly, Punch

Punch (magazine)

Punch, or the London Charivari was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Historically, it was most influential in the 1840s and 50s, when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration...

, The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

, The Telegraph Magazine, Transatlantic Review, Island, Meanjin

Meanjin

Meanjin is an Australian literary journal. The name - pronounced Mee-AN-jin - is derived from an Aboriginal word for the land where the city Brisbane is located.It was founded in December 1940, in Brisbane, by Clem Christesen...

, Overland

Overland (literary journal)

Overland is an Australian literary and cultural journal. It was founded in 1954, under the auspices of the Realist Writers Group in Melbourne, Australia, with Stephen Murray-Smith being the first editor. The current editor is Jeff Sparrow. The journal has a left-wing orientation.- External links :*...

, Quadrant and Westerly.

A co-worker and friend of Peter Carey, he wrote an early critical review of Carey's first book in Nation Review

Nation Review

Nation Reviewwas an Australian Sunday newspaper, which ceased publication in 1981. It was launched in 1970 after independent publisher Gordon Barton bought out Tom Fitzgerald's Nation publication and merged it with his own Sunday Review journal...

, 29 November 1974. In November 2006 he was given the Patrick White Award

Patrick White Award

The Patrick White Award is an annual literary prize established by Patrick White. White used his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature award to establish a trust for this prize....

for under-recognised, lifetime achievement in literature.

His 2008 novel To Light Attained deals with the suicide of his daughter.

Works

Novels

• Rappaport (Hodder and Stoughton, 1966)
• The London Jungle Adventures of Charlie Hope (Hodder and Stoughton, 1968)
• Happy Times (1969)
• Rappaport's Revenge (1973)
• Inside the Wardrobe (1975)
• Flying Home (1978)
• Running Nicely (1979)
• Dirty Friends (1981)
• Seven Books for Grossman (1983)
• Outrageous Behaviour (a collection of best stories, 1984)
• The Night We Ate the Sparrow (1985)
• Two Brothers, Running (1990)
• Madness (1991)
• The String (1995)
• Welcome to Tangier (1997)
• The Secret Strength of Children (2001)
• Seventeen Versions of Jewishness: Twenty Examples (2001)

Essays and journalism

• The English in Heat (1972)
• Hack Work (1977)
• Public Secrets (1981)
• Snow Jobs (1985)
• My Life as a Movie (1988)

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 was voted the favourite young storybook by an Australian author by schoolchildren in Victoria.