Murray Bail (b. 1941), writer, was born in Adelaide and spent several years in India and England in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In London, he wrote for the Transatlantic Review and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book of short stories, Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories, was published in England in 1975. His first novel Homesickness (1980) won the National Book Council Award and shared the Age Book of the Year Award; Holden's Performance (1987) won the 1988 Victorian Premier's Award for fiction. Bail wrote a lyrical monograph on the artist Ian Fairweather in 1981, which was republished in 2009. Described as 'one of our most remarkable fabulists', Bail has won critical acclaim and a number of major Australian literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Award for the beguiling Eucalyptus (1998). His subsequent novels include The Pages (2008) and The Voyage (2012). In 2021 he published his collection of autobiographical writings, He.
Jacqueline Mitelman's intimate photographic portrait of Bail captures him as a handsome, young intellectual, on the verge of fame with his award-winning first novel Homesickness.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2018
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Australian photographer, Jacqueline Mitelman, discusses her process for creating portraiture.
Dr Sarah Engledow explores the portraits of writers held in the National Portrait Gallery's collection.
