The Nobel Prize for Literature is soon to be announced. Of the 26 nominees, the current favourite is an 84-year-old man who lives in regional Victoria. Gerald Murnane might not be a household name in popular writing, but he has won numerous awards and is globally considered a literary great.
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00:00It took me a long, long time. I was nearly, I was over 70 before it happened, but it did
00:08happen. So, yeah, I survived. As I keep saying, though, it would have been a terrible thing
00:14if I'd been trying to make money out of writing or if I'd been very ambitious and wanted to
00:19be Australia's number one writer. I just did my kind of writing, had my few hundred readers,
00:26got my little bit of praise that kept me going, and I survived.
00:39It's about 10 years now since I was first, people first talked about me as a possible
00:45winner of the Nobel. It's like, it's possible, that's all I will concede, and it would be
00:54a wonderful result, but I'm satisfied at the moment, and if I never win the prize,
01:02I'll be satisfied with being the, and I have to say this, it's not a boast, it's a statement
01:08of fact, I'm the only Australian writer, and there's plenty of Australian writers, I'm
01:14the only one who gets mentioned every year as a likely winner of the Nobel, so I take
01:20a lot of pride and satisfaction from that. A writer is just an ordinary person with a
01:26special interest. In fact, I'm proud to live in Garope because it proves that I am an ordinary
01:31person, and I'm certainly not any sort of snob that says, oh, Garope hasn't got a bookshop
01:39with my books for sale. Garope is a delightful place to live, and the fact that I'm a writer
01:45really is just a, I could be, you know, could be anybody.