Born in Melbourne, Morris Lurie (1938–2014) was one of Australia’s most prolific writers, centring himself firmly in the fabulist tradition, or, more colloquially, as a spinner of yarns. The son of Jewish immigrant parents, Lurie, like Judah Waten before him, explored the conflict between the New World and the Old in compassionate, yet humorous, terms, finding a voice for hundreds of thousands of people caught up in the postwar migration.
His vast body of work includes novels, short stories, non-fiction collections and children’s books, among them his first comic novel Rappaport, his autobiography Whole Life and a book voted by Australian schoolchildren as their favourite, The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the steady and voluminous flow of his work, Lurie was always a professional craftsman. His style is colloquial and confessional, brimming with witty aphorisms and incisive dialogue. His humour teeters on the brink of the absurd, often the anarchistic, and his later works showed a considerable freedom of imagination.  Lurie is best known for his short stories. He was published in many prestigious magazines including The New Yorker, The Virginia Quarterly, Punch, The Times, The Telegraph Magazine, Transatlantic Review, Island, Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant and Westerly.
Morris Lurie was the recipient of the Patrick White Award in 2006.