|
RECENT EVENTS (see blog for coming
events)
I was at the Oxford
Literary Festival in April taking part in a panel on the writer Bruce
Chatwin and was at Holborn Library on Wednesday
18th February to talk about my Rack Press poetry imprint.
I appeared at the
Liverpool Shipping Lines Festival on 8th and 9th
November and the Folkestone Literary Festival on 4 November.
I read from my collection The
Narrators and some more recent work at Old World Books, Al Ponte
del Gheto Vechio, Cannaregio in Venice on Monday 13th October.
I
appeared at the Ilkley Literature Festival on Saturday 4th October to
talk about my new book on the Victorian travellers and explorers: A Corkscrew Is Most Useful: The Travellers
of Empire
(Little, Brown). I have already given talks on this title at the Oxford
Literary Festival on 1 April, and the Edinburgh International Book
Festival in August.
I also appeared at the Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts in
August to talk about my book: So
Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool
Latest Reviews
So Spirited A Town: Visions and
Versions of Liverpool has had several excellent reviews. See The Independent, 4 February 2008, The Liverpool Daily Post, 2
February 2008 and The Sunday Times,
17 February 2008. Stephen Bayley, however, in the New StatesmanPlanet magazine by Peter Finch
Latest review by me is in The Jewish
Chronicle (26 September) where I review James Hawes's Excavating Kafka. In The Independent I reviewed Ilya
Troyanov's novel The Collector of
Worlds on 18 July. In The
Literary Review I wrote about a new Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley
(April, 2008) ; The Independent,
21 March 2008 had a review on John Kerrigan's Archipelagic English. I reviewed
Anne Stevenson's new book of poems, Stone
Milk in Planet,
February/March 2008 No 187
Latest article is in the current issue of Poetry Salzburg Review where I
interview the poet Peter Dale. There are also several of my own poems
in the same issue. In Slightly Foxed
(N0 18) I wrote about Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals.
doesn't like the
book's cover, 3 April 2008. It is also reviewed in the latest
WHAT'S NEW...
The Victorian Travellers
Nicholas Murray's latest book A Corkscrew is Most Useful: the Travellers
of Empire has just been published by Little, Brown
Liverpool City of Culture
Nicholas
Murray's book about Liverpool and the writers who have left their
impressions of it down the centuries is published by Liverpool
University Press: So Spirited A
Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool
So
Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool has started
to attract excellent reviews. See The
Independent, 4 February 2008, The
Liverpool Daily Post, 2 February 2008 and The Sunday Times, 17 February 2008.
Stephen Bayley, however, in the New
Statesman doesn't like the book's cover, 3 April 2008.
Latest review by me is in The
Independent where I reviewed Ilya Troyanov's novel The Collector of Worlds on 18 July.
In The Literary Review I
wrote about a new Selected Letters
of Aldous Huxley (April, 2008) ; The Independent, 21 March 2008 had
a review on John Kerrigan's Archipelagic
English. I reviewed Anne Stevenson's new book of poems, Stone Milk in Planet, February/March 2008 No 187
Latest article is in the current issue of Slightly Foxed (N0 18) where I
write about Gerald Durrell's My
Family and Other Animals.
Coming Events
I
appeared at the Oxford Literary Festival on 1 April, and the Edinburgh
International Book Festival in August, and will be at the Ilkley
Festival in October to talk about my new book on the Victorian
travellers and explorers: A
Corkscrew Is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire (Little,
Brown).
I also appeared at the Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts in
August to talk about my book: So
Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool
Brave New World
I wrote a new introduction to a special edition of Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World
published on Saturday 17th March 2007 with The Independent
newspaper as part of its "Banned Books" editions. This attractive
hardback was available for £3.49 to purchasers of the newspaper
as one of 25 cutting edge titles
Poetry Reading at Philip Larkin Centre for Poetry and
Creative Writing, University of Hull
I read from my most recent
poetry collection The Narrators
(Rack Press, 2006) at the Phlip Larkin centre, Tuesday 20th March. 2007.
Sybille Bedford Remembered
In a recent book paying tribute
to Sybille Bedford, In Memory
(Eland) I contributed a chapter on Bedford's relationship with the
Huxleys. I also wrote in a recent issue of Areté
magazine [No 20, Spring/Summer 2006] about my conversations with the
writer who died in February 2006, aged 94. Sybille Bedford was a
novelist and travel writer who wrote the first authorised life of
Aldous Huxley thirty years ago. I interviewed her several times
when writing my own biography, Aldous Huxley: An English
Intellectual
(2002) and the piece gives a picture of the writer at the very end of
her life and contains some previously undisclosed information about
Huxley. For information about how to obtain the article see
www.aretemagazine.com.
Huxley, Orwell and Twentieth
Century Utopian Fiction
I
delivered a lecture on 20 July 2006 to the Scottish Universities'
International Summer School on theutopian fictions of Aldous Huxley and
George Orwell.
Your Favourite Martians...
On
Monday 20 November 2006 on BBC4 I was interviewed in a programme about
the famous twentieth century dystopias of Aldous Huxley and George
Orwell as part of BBC4's "Science Fiction Britannia" season. Part
2 of "The Martians and Us" was made by Blast Films for BBC4..
A
videoclip of the Murray interview can be seen at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mysciencefictionlife/A16381280
Kafka
Lecture in Edinburgh
I
gave the seventh annual lecture of the Scottish Czech and Slovak Summer
Scholarship Fund in Edinburgh's St Cecilia's Hall on 22 April 2006
Publishing Dumbs Down...
The January issue (Dec/Jan
2005-6, No 174) of the magazine Planet had an article by me
on the crisis in contemporary publishing.
To
subscribe to Planet visit
www.planetmagazine.org.uk.
To read this article click here
About the Author
Nicholas
Murray is a freelance author based in Wales and London. Born in
Liverpool in 1952 he is the author of several literary biographies (see
Bibliography), two collections of poems, and two novels. He is a
regular contributor of poems, essays and reviews to newspapers and
literary magazines such as The
Independent, London Magazine, Thumbscrew, Metre, Poetry Wales, New
Welsh Review, Planet, Times Literary Supplement, Areté and
many others. In 1996 he was the inaugural Gladys Krieble Delmas
Fellow at the British Library Centre for the Book and he is a member of
the Welsh Academy and of English PEN. He has lectured at literary
festivals and universities in Britain, Europe and the United
States. He is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen
Mary University of London.
|
|
|
|
Author Interviews
To
see interviews click here
Bibliography
A TOUR OF MY BOOKS
Click HERE for
more information on the titles below
Bruce Chatwin (1993)
Seren Books (revised edition with new afterword, 1995).
Plausible Fictions (1995). Rack Press [poems].
A Life of Matthew Arnold (1996) Hodder & Stoughton (London); St
Martin's Press (USA).
After Arnold: Culture and
Accessibility (1997). The
British Library, Centre for the Book.
World Enough and Time:
The Life
of Andrew Marvell (1999) Little, Brown (London); St Martin's Press
(USA).
A Short Book About Love (2001).
Seren Books.
Aldous Huxley: an English
Intellectual (2002)
Little, Brown (UK); St Martin's Press (USA)
Remembering Carmen (2003)
Seren Books
Kafka (2004)
Little, Brown (UK); Yale University Press (USA
The Narrators (2006)
Rack Press
So Spirited a Town:
Visions and Versions of Liverpool (2007)
Liverpool University Press
A Corkscrew is Most
Useful: The Travellers of Empire (2008)
Little, Brown
Other Contributions
Art for All? Their
Policies and
Our Culture (2000)
In Memory: Sybille
Bedford (2007,
Eland)
_____________
And on a lighter
note...
Nicholas Murray was a
regular
contributor in the 1980s and 1990s to the New Statesman
Weekend Competition, the Independent Magazine
competition and others. This dedicated pursuit of literary
frivolity resulted in occasional brief contributions to titles such as Bindweed's
Bestseller edited by David Godwin and the title below edited by
Gavin Ewart:
Other
People's Clerihews (1983)
Past
Articles
Earlier
articles
have included a review in The Independent (7 March 2003) of
Chris Peachment's novel, The Green and The Gold; "The Shrinking
of Language" in Planet (July 2003); a review of Kathi Diamant's
Kafka's Last Love (Independent, 10
September); a
review of John Banville's Prague Portraits (Independent,
13 September) and an article on the Booker Prize in Tribune, 19
September. An article on biography appeared in The Guardian,
13 December 2003 and an article on literary prizes in Planet,
April 2004 No 164. An article on Kafka appeared in The Jewish
Chronicle in July 2004. His review of Roberto Calasso's K
was published in The Independent on 7 October 2005. A
piece in the Independent on Sunday "Building a Library"
feature covered books on Prague (31 July 2005).
New Poems
New poems have
appeared in The New Welsh Review, Winter issue and in the
spring 2004 issue of Metre. More are forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review, Autumn 2008
Past
Festivals, Talks and Readings
Nicholas
Murray has lectured on Kafka to the Scottish Czech-Slovak Summer
Scholarship Fund and, on Orwell and Huxley's dystopian fictions to the
2006 Scottish Universities, International Summer School. He has
taken part in a panel at the British Library as part of the Orange Word
"Classic Book" series chaired by Peter Florence, to discuss Franz
Kafka's The Trial. He has also appeared at the Festival of
Words in Glamorgan and at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea with Dai
Vaughan, author of Totes Meer, where the topic was writing and
politics. He appeared at the Hay Festival of Literature on 3 June
2004 to launch his new biography of Franz Kafka. The book was launched
in London with a talk at the Goethe Institute on 14 June that
year. On 4 February 2005 he gave a lecture on Bruce Chatwin at
the "Gage05" Festival at Hull. On 15 September 2005 he gave a talk to
the Wotton's Society at Eton College on "The perennial philosophy:
Aldous Huxley's search for transcendence."
TV and Radio
Nicholas
Murray took part on 1 January 2005 in a BBC Radio 4 programme, The
First Trip, exploring the history of LSD, its effects on the mind,
and its use within the worlds of music and art. He appeared on 20 May 2004 on BBC4's new series of
Battle of the Books where Aldous Huxley's Brave
New
World was pitted against Philip K Dick's Valis. The
winner was Brave New World. Recent radio interviews include One
Word radio
and BBC Scotland. His hour long interview about Kafka with
Canadian Broadcasting Company's "Writers & Company" was broadcast
in April 2005.
Web Interview
Nicholas Murray was
interviewed on
30 June 2004 and again in March 2008 by www.readysteadybook.com. Follow that link to read the interview.
Literary Prizes
Aldous Huxley: an English
Intellectual
was one of six titles shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography
Prize in 2003. The winner, announced on 7th October 2003, was Rosalind
Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox.
Some Useful Links
Nicholas Murray is a member
of
English PEN. For information about English PEN and its work see: www.englishpen.org
Try a lively new
link to some of the best contemporary poets at Poetry pf:
www.poetrypf.co.uk
|
|
