Leading Australian Poet Les Murray will join UTS for 2010 as CAL Writer in Residence providing students with a close up and personal view of his creative work in process.
‘It is fitting’, said John Dale, Head of Creative Practices at UTS ‘that Australia’s leading poet is the Writer in Residence at Australia’s leading writing program’. Dale added that the 2009 residency with Frank Moorhouse was a great success and students benefited enormously from Frank’s presence.
Murray is Australia's leading poet and one of the greatest contemporary poets writing in English. His work has been published in ten languages. Murray has won many literary awards, including the Grace Leven Prize (1980 and 1990), the Petrarch Prize (1995), and the prestigious TS Eliot Award (1996). In 1999 he was awarded the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes.
Thanks to funding from the Copyright Agency Limited, a major Australian writer receives an office and $40,000 for a year’s residency and his or her work is studied by creative writing students at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. In return the writer will give two public lectures and be available for individual consultation and writing workshops.
