Moses "Morris" Lurie (30 October 19388 October 2014) was an Australian writer of
comic novel
A comic novel is a novel-length work of humorous fiction. Many well-known authors have written comic novels, including P. G. Wodehouse, Henry Fielding, Mark Twain, and John Kennedy Toole. Comic novels are often defined by the author's literary ...
s, 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.
Biography
Lurie was born Moses Lurie
[John Van Tiggelen, "The bitter pen", ''The Sydney Morning Herald'', 6 November 1999, Good Weekend, p. 55] in 1948 to Arie and Esther Lurie (Jewish emigrants from Poland) at the
Royal Women's Hospital
The Royal Women's Hospital, located in the Melbourne suburb of Parkville, is Australia's oldest specialist women's hospital. It offers a full range of services in maternity, gynaecology, neonatal care, women's cancers and women's health. It also ...
in
Carlton
Carlton may refer to:
People
* Carlton (name), a list of those with the given name or surname
* Carlton (singer), English soul singer Carlton McCarthy
* Carlton, a pen name used by Joseph Caldwell (1773–1835), American educator, Presbyterian ...
, a suburb of
Melbourne
Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a met ...
.
[Morris Lurie profile]
", Penguin Books, retrieved 2010-01-21 He was named after an uncle who had died in Poland.
[ 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
RMIT University, officially the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,, section 4(b) is a public research university in Melbourne, Australia.
Founded in 1887 by Francis Ormond, RMIT began as a night school offering classes in art, scienc ...
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 New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'', '' The Virginia Quarterly'', ''Punch
Punch commonly refers to:
* Punch (combat), a strike made using the hand closed into a fist
* Punch (drink), a wide assortment of drinks, non-alcoholic or alcoholic, generally containing fruit or fruit juice
Punch may also refer to:
Places
* Pun ...
'', ''The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
'', ''The Telegraph Magazine
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally.
It was fou ...
'', ''Transatlantic Review
Transatlantic, Trans-Atlantic or TransAtlantic may refer to:
Film
* Transatlantic Pictures, a film production company from 1948 to 1950
* Transatlantic Enterprises, an American production company in the late 1970s
* ''Transatlantic'' (1931 film), ...
'', ''Island
An island (or isle) is an isolated piece of habitat that is surrounded by a dramatically different habitat, such as water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An island ...
'', ''Meanjin
''Meanjin'' (), formerly ''Meanjin Papers'' and ''Meanjin Quarterly'', is an Australian literary magazine. The name is derived from the Turrbal word for the spike of land where the city of Brisbane is located. It was founded in 1940 in Brisbane ...
'', '' Overland'', '' Quadrant'' and '' Westerly''.
In his 2008 novel, ''To Light Attained'', Lurie deals with the subject of suicide. His daughter Rachel had died by suicide in 1993, aged 23.[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
* 1973 – FAW State of Victoria Short Story Award: winner for 'Skylight in Lausanne'[
* 1983 – ]Children's Book Council of Australia
The Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) is a not for profit organisation which aims to engage the community with literature for young Australians. The CBCA presents the annual Children's Book of the Year Awards to books of literary merit ...
Book of the Year Award: commended for 'Toby's Millions'[
* 1985 – National Book Council Award for Australian Literature, 1985: joint second for 'The Night We Ate the Sparrow : A Memoir and Fourteen Stories'][
* 1986 winner of the inaugural Young Australian's Best Book Award for 'The 27th Annual Hippopotamus Race'][
* 1988 – NBC Banjo Awards: second for 'Whole Life : An Autobiography'][
* 1991 – ]KOALA
The koala or, inaccurately, koala bear (''Phascolarctos cinereus''), is an arboreal herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. It is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae and its closest living relatives are the womb ...
, Primary Readers: winner for 'The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race '[
* 1994 – Island-North Essay Competition: runner-up for The Fat Kid's Revenge][
* 1994 – Ulitarra-Sheaffer Pen Short Story Competition: winner for 'Towards a New Definition of Radical Feminism'][
* 2006 – ]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.
The $25,000 cash award is given to a writer who has been highly creative o ...
for under-recognised, lifetime achievement in literature
Works
Novels and short story collections
*''Rappaport'' (Hodder and Stoughton, 1966)
*''The London Jungle Adventures of Charlie Hope'' (Hodder and Stoughton, 1968)
*''Happy Times'' (Hodder and Stoughton, 1969)
*''Rappaport's Revenge'' (Angus & Robertson, 1973)
*''Home is'' (1974)
*''Inside the Wardrobe'' (Outback Press, 1975)
*''Flying Home'' (Outback Press, 1978)
*''Running Nicely'' (Thomas Nelson, 1979)
*''Dirty Friends'' (Penguin Books, 1981)
*''Seven Books for Grossman'' (Penguin Books, 1983)
*''Outrageous Behaviour'' (a collection of best stories, Penguin Books, 1984)
*''The Night We Ate the Sparrow'' (McPhee Gribble, 1985)
*''Two Brothers, Running'' (Penguin Books, 1990)
*''Madness'' (Angus & Robertson, 1991)
*''The String'' (McPhee Gribble, 1995)
*''Welcome to Tangier'' (Penguin Books, 1997)
*''The Secret Strength of Children'' (Bruce Sims Books, 2001)
*''Seventeen Versions of Jewishness: Twenty Examples'' (Common Ground, 2001)
*''To Light Attained'' (Hybrid Publishers, 2008)
*''Hergesheimer Hangs In'' (Arcadia/Australian Scholarly, 2011)
*''Hergesheimer in the Present Tense'' (Hybrid Publishers, 2014)
*''My Greatest Ambition (1984)
Essays and journalism
*''The English in Heat'' (Angus & Robertson, 1972)
*''Hack Work'' (Outback Press, 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 schoolchildren in Victoria voted their favourite young storybook by an Australian author.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lurie, Morris
1938 births
2014 deaths
20th-century Australian novelists
21st-century Australian novelists
Australian children's writers
Australian male novelists
Australian male short story writers
Australian people of Polish-Jewish descent
Australian memoirists
Jewish Australian writers
RMIT University alumni
Writers from Melbourne
Patrick White Award winners
Deaths from cancer in Victoria (Australia)
20th-century Australian short story writers
21st-century Australian short story writers
20th-century Australian male writers
21st-century Australian male writers
People educated at Melbourne High School