Murray Middleton is a Melbourne-based writer.
His first collection of stories, When There’s Nowhere Else to Run, won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. He is also a winner of The Age Short Story Award and was named The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist.
Murray’s novel, No Church in the Wild, was published by Picador/Pan Macmillan in 2024 and shortlisted for the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize 2024. His next collection of short stories, U Want it Darker, was published in 2025.
Praise for U Want it Darker:
“Raw, real, unflinching” Readings
“Darkly funny” The Age/SMH
“Beautifully observed through an idiosyncratic and witty lens, these stories are beguilingly strange and deeply human adventures into the getting of wisdom.” – JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH
“The odds are so stacked against any creative work that it’s a wonder this book exists at all. Middleton’s portraits of struggling artists are uncomfortably familiar, bitterly funny, and cut with honest truth.” – JENNIFER MILLS
Praise for No Church in the Wild:
‘Murray Middleton deftly avoids the landmines in his propulsive new novel. He takes on a story whose hoary origins hark back to Blackboard Jungle, and which has for too long been mired in journalistic cliché and in hand-wringing sentimentality, and he makes it fresh, troubling and compelling. The structure is cinematic, but the real strength is in the operatic assuredness of the writing. The chorus of voices have real bite, real sting and real tenderness and truth. It sounds like real life.’ CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS
‘No Church in the Wild is amazing; a novel of wisdom and assurance and audacity. The fact that this book exists is a triumph. The fact that it works – and that it’s so good – is a miracle.’ MILES ALLINSON
‘A fierce, urgent, necessary book.’ JAMES BRADLEY
‘A big-thinking … important and career-making second novel.’ Readings
Praise for When There’s Nowhere Else to Run:
“Assured, witty and wise.” The Australian
“Vivid and compelling.” BooksPlus
“Murray Middleton has written something close to a great contemporary Australian novel.” Newtown Review of Books
“Middleton’s writing is deliciously lean and exquisitely polished.” Judges’ comments, SMH Best Young Australian Novelist