Morris Lurie

Moses Lurie was born in 1938 to two Jewish emigrants from Poland, who named him after an uncle who died in Poland. Though born in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, he grew up, went to school, and worked in Melbourne. When Lurie was five years old, his father brought home American, full-color comic books that had been packed in with machinery. Though they were crumpled and greasy from his father’s factory, Lurie immediately fell in love with the stories and the comic book genre as a whole. As a child, Lurie would often lie to his parents or steal from his mother for money to buy more comics. Despite his dream to become a comic book artist himself, Lurie studied architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and went on to work in advertising. After working in advertising through the 1960s, Lurie began his writing career when he published his first book, Rappaport, in 1966. As a writer, Lurie traveled broadly, visiting Greece, England, New York, Morrocco, and more. His travels as well as his isolating identity as the child of emigrants informed much of his writing, and his characters often share his identity and experiences. Lurie wrote across many genres, though he is most famous for his short stories, which have been published in magazines around the world. Throughout his career, he composed over 20 novels and short story collections. In 2014, Lurie died of cancer in Melbourne, a month after publishing his final short story collection, Hergesheimer in the Present Tense.