Nicholas Murray (biographer)

Nicholas Murray is a British literary biographer, poet and journalist. He has written literary biographies of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold, several poetry collections, and two novels. He is a regular contributor of essays and reviews to magazines. He has given talks at literary festivals (including the Presteigne Festival, and the Bloomsbury Festival), and at universities and other institutions in the UK, Europe and the United States. He has been tutor in biography and creative non-fiction at the City Literary Institute, London.

Career

Nicholas Murray was born in Liverpool in 1952, attended St Mary’s College, Crosby, and graduated in 1973 in English Language and Literature from Liverpool University, where he had been honorary editor of the Guild Gazette, the newspaper of the University of Liverpool Guild of Undergraduates. Nicholas worked as an information officer and journalist for various organisations, including Greater London Council and NCVO. From 1987 he was a freelance journalist. Nicholas was an active member of Bermondsey Labour Party from 1979 to 1987 and was its Assistant Secretary at the time of the Bermondsey by-election in 1983.

Nicholas and his wife Susan Guest (married 1975) founded Rack Press, in 2005, which has published over 50 poets.

Awards and Fellowships

1987 Local Government Journalist of the Year Award

1996-7 inaugural Gladys Krieble Delmas Fellow at the British Library Centre for the Book

1997 New York Times Notable Book of the Year for A Life of Matthew Arnold

2002 Fellow of the Welsh Academy

2003 Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Award

2003-2007 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary University, London

2010-2011 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at King's College, London.

2013 Literature Wales Writer’s Bursary

2015 Robert Graves Prize (formerly Ruskin Prize) joint second prize

2015 Basil Bunting Award for Poetry, first prize

2018 New Welsh Writing Awards, runner-up

2019 Poetry London Clore Prize, highly commended

2013 and 2014 for Rack Press - Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlets Awards for Publishers

Works

Literary Biographies

• Bruce Chatwin (Border Lines, Seren, 1993)

• A Life of Matthew Arnold (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996)

• After Arnold: Culture and Accessibility (British Library, 1997)

• World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (Little, Brown, 1999)

• Aldous Huxley': An English Intellectual (Little, Brown, 2002)
• Kafka (Little, Brown, 2004)

• The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: British Poets of the First World War (Little, Brown, 2011)

• Bloomsbury and the Poets (Rack Press Editions, 2014)

Poetry Collections

• Plausible Fictions (Rack Press, 1995)
• The Narrators (Rack Press, 2006)
• Get Real! (Rack Press, 2011)
• Acapulco: New and Selected Poems (The Melos Press, 2012)
• Of Earth, Water, Air and Fire: Animal Poems (The Melos Press, 2013)
• Trench Feet (Rack Press, 2014)
• The Secrets of the Sea (The Melos Press, 2015)
• The Migrant Ship (The Melos Press, 2016)
• A Dog’s Brexit (The Melos Press, 2017)
• The Museum of Truth (The Melos Press, 2018)
• The Yellow Wheelbarrow (The Melos Press, 2019)
• A Quartet in Winter (Rack Press, 2020)
• City Lights (The Melos Press, 2021)
• Elsewhere: Collected Poems of Nicholas Murray (The Melos Press, 2022)
• The Dictionary Speaks (The Melos Press, 2023)
• River Run For the Wye in Hard Times (Rack Press Broadside No 1, 2024)

Fiction

• A Short Book About Love (Seren, 2001)
• Remembering Carmen (Seren, 2003)

Non-fiction

• So Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool (Liverpool University Press, 2007)
• A Corkscrew Is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire (Little, Brown, 2008)
• Real Bloomsbury (Seren, 2010)
• Crossings: A Journey through Borders (Seren, 2016)

Contributions to Anthologies

• The Poet’s View: poems for paintings in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool ed Gladys Mary Coles (1996)
• Other People’s Clerihews ed Gavin Ewart (Oxford University Press,1983)
• The Robin Hood Book: verse versus austerity eds Alan Morrison and Angela Topping (Caparison, 2012)
• Poets for Corbyn, Bennetts, Russell (Pendant Publishing, 2015)
• New Boots and Pantisocracies eds WN Herbert and Andy Jackson (Smokestack Books, 2016)
• Poems for Jeremy Corbyn ed Merryn Williams (Shoestring, 2016)
• Poems from the Borders ed Amy Wack (Seren, 2019)
• Ten Poems About Swimming ed Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch (Candlestick Press 2022)
• Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry ed Alexander Adams (The Bournbrook Press, 2022)

External links

• Official site
• Bibliophilic literary blog
• Kafka, review in The Observer, 13 Jun 2004
• Blog review of The Red Sweet Wine Of Youth
• "A Fine and Private Man" from The Washington Post
• "Tremors of Implication " from The New York Times
• Real Bloomsbury blog