Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., Trinity College, Dublin; M.A.,
University of East Agnlia.
• Currently—lives in
Murray was born in Dublin in 1975, the son of a professor of Anglo-Irish Drama in UCD and a teacher mother. Murray attended Blackrock College in south Dublin, an experience that would later provide the basis for the school in Skippy Dies. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and subsequently completed his Masters in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He also spent time in Barcelona as an English teacher, a time he did not enjoy, describing it as "a brief and unhappy stint teaching English to a Catalan businessman, who pointed out many faults in my grammar I had not known about hitherto". He describes Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as a very influential book to him.
Murray has written two novels: his first, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize in 2003 and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. His second novel Skippy Dies was longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It was also #3 on Time magazine's top ten works of fiction from 2010. (From Wikipedia.)