His agent, Margaret Connolly, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.
Considered Australia’s unofficial poet laureate and for years discussed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Murray published nearly 30 volumes. His last anthology, “Collected Poems,” released last year, contains more than 700 poems.
Murray possessed “a fierce moral vision and a sensuous musicality,” Meghan O’Rourke wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 2011, and “in his most intimate poems, reminds us of the power of literature to transubstantiate grievance into insight.”
Murray was a voracious reader, a self-taught translator of many languages, a genial conversationalist and a walking dictionary. His mother died suddenly when he was young, and his life was marked by poverty and bouts of depression, but he found joy in nature’s splendor, in writing poetry and in Roman Catholicism, to which he converted in his mid-20s.
“He was an extraordinary mixture of a sort of slightly autistic bloke from the bush and, at the same time, one of the most intelligent and creative people that you’d ever known,” one of his publishers, Michael Duffy, said in a telephone interview.
Murray’s renown spread outside Australia in the 1990s. He won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize in Britain in 1996 for his collection “Subhuman Redneck Poems” and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. (He found that honor funny, given his longtime advocacy for Australia’s departure from the Commonwealth).
He stirred hostility in Australia’s left-leaning literary circles after defending the anti-immigration politician Pauline Hanson in a poem published in 1999. He was also for many years a poetry editor of the conservative Australian magazine Quadrant. He dedicated many of his books to “the glory of God,” a somewhat provocative statement in Australia’s largely secular arts crowd.
But those who knew Murray — and even those who butted heads with him — said pigeonholing him as right-wing was simplistic.
“Les took the position always contrary,” the Australian poet John Kinsella, who would often argue with Murray about politics, said in a telephone interview.
Peter F. Alexander, the author of “Les Murray: A Life in Progress” (2000), wrote that Murray was always “on the side of the outcast: the poor, the powerless, the odd, the unemployed, the unfashionable.”
Murray, who was bullied in his youth and saw himself as a perpetual outsider, had a lifelong abhorrence for “enforced conformity” and “intellectual gangs, particularly literary and academic ones,” Alexander wrote.
Leslie Allan Murray was born on Oct. 17, 1938, in Nabiac, New South Wales, a little over three hours north of Sydney, to Cecil and Miriam (Arnall) Murray, who were dairy farmers. An only child, he grew up in the isolated nearby valley town of Bunyah in a primitive shack with leaky shingles.
A curious and restless boy with different colored eyes (one blue, one green), Murray was quickly fascinated by language and started hounding his mother for the meanings of words at about age 3. She told him a few years later that English was not the world’s only language, and he spent the rest of his life learning all he could of the world’s words, as if the shock of that revelation never subsided.
By the time he began his schooling at 9 (in a school with just one teacher), he had read and memorized much of his mother’s eight-volume encyclopedia.
When he was 12, his mother, who had suffered multiple miscarriages, had an ectopic pregnancy and hemorrhaged badly.
His father called for an ambulance but would not explain her condition over the phone. “She’s having a bad turn,” he said instead, desperately hoping the doctor would understand. The doctor refused to dispatch an ambulance, and Miriam Murray died.
“The appeal fell into a linguistic chasm between social classes,” Murray said years later of his father’s call. He also suggested that his father was worried about the town gossip listening from the local switchboard, or that he was incapable of discussing “women’s matters.”
Murray recalled the harrowing event in one of his angriest and most emotional poems, “The Steel”:
and on Friday afternoon
our family world
went inside itself forever.
After his wife’s death, Cecil Murray collapsed with grief and guilt. He stopped cooking and shaving. His vegetable garden choked with weeds. Les, used to being doted on and barely in his teens, learned to take care of his father.
In “Burning Want,” Murray wrote unflinchingly of the trauma that took root:
From just on puberty, I lived in funeral:
mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead,
we’d boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden.
Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle.
He attended Taree High School, near Bunyah. Six feet tall with a heavy build, he was taunted for his size but rarely used his strength to retaliate.
After graduation, he received a scholarship to attend the University of Sydney, where his contemporaries included future Australian cultural luminaries like writer Clive James, feminist author Germaine Greer and art critic Robert Hughes.
Murray soon abandoned his lectures and spent hours reading foreign dictionaries in the university library. He failed his exams and his scholarship was withdrawn, although it was later reinstated when his marks improved.
In the early 1960s he spiraled into depression, dropped out of university and became homeless. (He returned to finish his arts degree in 1969.)
Still, he wrote poetry. His work appeared in Australian journals for the first time in 1961, and critics started paying attention.
He hitchhiked around the country, seeing greater Australia for the first time. He returned to Sydney and his depression lifted in 1962, the year he met and married Valerie Morelli. The couple had five children, Christina, Daniel, Clare, Alexander and Peter, who survive him, along with Morelli and seven grandchildren.
His first book was “The Ilex Tree,” a collection of poems by Murray and Geoffrey Lehmann, published in 1965. It received positive reviews in Australia and Britain, particularly Murray’s poem “The Burning Truck.”
Murray held a few jobs in his early years. He was a translator at the Australian National University in Canberra and answered mail for the prime minister, John Gorton.
He left the 9-to-5 jobs behind in 1971 and became a full-time poet, scratching together a living from his writing and readings. In later years, he was known for offering blunt but encouraging feedback in handwritten notes to emerging poets.
In 1985 he and his family left Sydney for Bunyah to take care of his ailing father. But the return stirred up old trauma, and Murray sank into a depression that lasted for eight years, which he documented in “Killing the Black Dog” (1997), a memoir written partly in verse and partly in prose.
While he wrote deftly of life’s cruelties, Murray also captured the joys of his Australian experience. He even composed an ode to shorts (“spirituality with pockets!”), “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”:
Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,
—
to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or patient bare hand, beneath the cadijiput trees,
—
to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further topics.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.