Nicholas Murray

Nicholas Murray is a freelance author based in the Welsh Marches. Born in Liverpool and educated at Liverpool University where he read English he is the author of several literary biographies including lives of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold. He has written books about Liverpool and about Bloomsbury; a book about the British Victorian travellers; a book about the British poets of the First World War; six collections of poems; and two novels. His biography of Matthew Arnold was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1997 and his biography of Aldous Huxley was shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Prize in 2003. His biography of Franz Kafka has been translated into nine languages. He is a regular contributor of poems, essays and reviews to a wide range of newspapers and literary magazines. In 1996 he was the inaugural Gladys Krieble Delmas Fellow at the British Library Centre for the Book and he is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy and a member of English PEN. He has lectured at literary festivals and universities in Britain, Europe and the United States. From 2003-2007 he was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary, University London and from 2010-2011 an RLF Fellow at King’s College, London where he later taught seminars on good writing. He has been a tutor in biography, travel-writing and creative non-fiction at the City Literary Institute in London. His anti-Brexit verse satire A Dog’s Brexit was published in 2016 and his most recent poetry collection is The Yellow Wheelbarrow (2019). Bloomsbury and the Poets was published in 2014 and Crossings: a journey through borders in 2016. He was the winner of the 2015 Basil Bunting Prize for poetry and highly commended in the 2019 Poetry London Clore Prize. With his wife, Susan Murray, he runs the small award-winning poetry imprint, Rack Press.