Editing Murray Bail (section)

==Career==
He is most well known for ''[[Eucalyptus (novel)|Eucalyptus]]'', which won the [[Miles Franklin Award]] in 1999.  His other work includes the novels ''Homesickness'', which was a joint winner of [[The Age Book of the Year]] in 1980, and ''Holden's Performance'', another award-winner. Reviewers recently compared Bail's ''Notebooks 1970-2003'' with [[Proust]], [[André Gide|Gide]] and [[Paul Valéry|Valéry]]'s. ''The Pages'' [2008] was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. His latest novel, ''The Voyage'', was released in November 2012.

Laurie Clancy suggests that Bail is, with [[Peter Carey (novelist)|Peter Carey]] and [[Frank Moorhouse]], one of the chief innovators in Australian short story writing, and that he was part of its revival in the 1970s. He notes that Bail is particularly interested in the relationship between language and reality, and that this is evident in his early short stories. About the story ‘Portrait of Electricity’ from the collection ''Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories'' (1975), Clancy says that "the story displays the strange mixture of surrealist fantasy and broad satire of Australian mores that characterizes all of Bail's work".<ref>Laurie Clancy, ''A Reader's Guide to Australian Fiction'', pp. 321-322</ref>

After early success with short fiction, Bail turned to the novel as a form commensurate with his vision of life's complexity, which emerges in all its perplexing intricacy in ''Homesickness''. This first novel describes the unscripted, global travels of a group of Australian tourists to diverse museums, real and imaginary. His next book, ''Holden's Performance'', dealt more overtly with issues of national identity and the diverse forces that shape individual character. His later novels explored related issues in terms of a key binary: in ''Eucalyptus'', these are empirical knowledge and imagination, and in ''The Pages'' psychology and philosophy. Bail prides himself on being a novelist of ideas, who is determined to be audacious in his creations and to challenge reader expectations and complacency.{{citation needed|date=February 2018}}

The standard study of his work is Michael Ackland's ''The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail'' (2012).