Leslie Allan Murray was born on October 17, 1938, in Bunyah, New South Wales, Australia. Les  Murray is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. His poetry has won many awards and he is regarded as "the leading Australian poet of his generation". He attended the University of Sydney where he studied modern languages, worked as a translator, and served in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve.

His recent collections include The Biplane Houses ( 2007), Poems the Size of Photographs (2004), Learning Human(1998), which was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize and Subhuman Redneck Poems, winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize. He is also the author of two verse novels. The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1992), and Fredy Neptune. A Novel in Verse (1999), which centers around the picaresque life of German-Australian sailor Friedrich Boettcher, a kind of Nordic hero who witnesses and records, in the demotic style, the foibles of his age. He was formerly the editor of Poetry Australia and is currently the editor of Quadrant Magazine. Murray’s work has been translated into 10 languages, and he has been awarded the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.