Welcome

Welcome to my website which showcases my own work as an author and poet, including non-fiction, reviews and essays and work from my other enterprise, Rack Press. Click HERE for a full author profile and a bibliography of my writing. You can read extracts from my work in the Poetry, Fiction and Non-fiction sections and hear and see readings in the Audio and video section.

 

 

NEW WORK IN POETRY AND FICTION

Published September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published September 2022

 

Nicholas Murray’s many books include poetry, two novels, critically acclaimed biographies of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell, and Matthew Arnold, and studies of Liverpool, Bloomsbury and British poets of the First World War. He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy and, with his wife Sue, runs the prize-winning poetry imprint, Rack Press.

Nicholas Murray’s poems deal with love and art, humanity, politics, and the natural world in a body of work marked by both passion and fine craftsmanship. David Harsent has written that Murray has ‘a sure hand, whether with hard-edged satire…or sense impressions that produce place and event so vividly’

Praise for earlier collections of poems:
Of earth, water, air and fire ‘A real treat…an elemental menagerie in which the poet’s own delight through verbal magic becomes ours’. Christopher Reid
Get Real ‘A bravura display of finely controlled outrage.’ Times Literary Supplement
The Museum of Truth ‘A stunning collection.’ Martina Evans
City Lights ‘The poems have an emotional intelligence, a wit, that I really admire.’ Michèle Roberts

 

 

City Lights (2021)

This wide-ranging and versatile 32-page pamphlet collection contains the longer sequences “The Song of Rhodri” (the voice of an imaginary medieval Welsh bard) and “The World Tree” (poems about trees in myth and reality drawing on Norse legend) as well as poems of contemporary political resonance. From the Welsh countryside to Washington DC and all points in between these poems are both lyrical and engaged.  Order from Bibliophilic Blogger.

 

 

 

 

A Quartet in Winter (2020) 

 

In the fourth of a series of formal verse satires that began in 2011 with Get Real! and which included Trench Feet (2014) and A Dog’s Brexit (Melos, 2017) Nicholas Murray evokes the Welsh Marches in early winter, when “frost lays its dust-sheet on the Radnor Hills”, contemplating, in rustic confinement in a pandemic, a world of “smirking kleptocrats on giant screens”, and the fate of the Earth “we treat so roughly”.

The pamphlet (£5, 12pp) can be ordered post-free from Rack Press or any bookshop.

 

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