Moses "Morris" Lurie (30 October 19388 October 2014) was an Australian writer of comic novels, short stories, essays, plays, and children's books. His work focused on the comic mishaps of Jewish-Australian men (often writers) of Lurie's generation, who are invariably jazz fans.

Biography

Lurie was born Moses Lurie in 1938 to Arie and Esther Lurie (Jewish emigrants from Poland) at the Royal Women's Hospital in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne. He was named after an uncle who had died in Poland. His daughter Rachel had died by suicide in 1993, aged 23.

Lurie succumbed to cancer on 8 October 2014, at the Wantirna Hospice in Melbourne's eastern suburbs.

Awards

  • 1973 – FAW State of Victoria Short Story Award: winner for 'Skylight in Lausanne'
  • 1978 – National Book Council Award for Australian Literature: highly commended for 'Flying Home : a novel'
  • 1988 – NBC Banjo Awards: second for 'Whole Life : An Autobiography'

Works

Novels and short story collections

  • Rappaport (Hodder and Stoughton, 1966)
  • The London Jungle Adventures of Charlie Hope (Hodder and Stoughton, 1968)
  • Happy Times (Hodder and Stoughton, 1969)
  • Rappaport's Revenge (Angus & Robertson, 1973)
  • Home is (1974)
  • Inside the Wardrobe (Outback Press, 1975)
  • Flying Home (Outback Press, 1978)
  • Running Nicely (Thomas Nelson, 1979)
  • Dirty Friends (Penguin Books, 1981)
  • Seven Books for Grossman (Penguin Books, 1983)
  • Outrageous Behaviour (a collection of best stories, Penguin Books, 1984)
  • The Night We Ate the Sparrow (McPhee Gribble, 1985)
  • Two Brothers, Running (Penguin Books, 1990)
  • Madness (Angus & Robertson, 1991)
  • The String (McPhee Gribble, 1995)
  • Welcome to Tangier (Penguin Books, 1997)
  • The Secret Strength of Children (Bruce Sims Books, 2001)
  • Seventeen Versions of Jewishness: Twenty Examples (Common Ground, 2001)
  • To Light Attained (Hybrid Publishers, 2008)
  • Hergesheimer Hangs In (Arcadia/Australian Scholarly, 2011)
  • Hergesheimer in the Present Tense (Hybrid Publishers, 2014)

Essays and journalism

  • The English in Heat (Angus & Robertson, 1972)
  • Hack Work (Outback Press, 1977)
  • Public Secrets (1981)
  • Snow Jobs (1985)
  • My Life as a Movie (1988)

Other books include a collection of plays called Waterman (1979); an autobiography Whole Life (1987); and a number of children's books, including the popular Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race (1969), which schoolchildren in Victoria voted their favourite young storybook by an Australian author.