Morris Lurie

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 1948 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. He was schooled at Elwood Central School, Prahran Technical School and Melbourne High School, and then studied architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology before working in advertising.
His first novel was the comic "Rappaport" (Hodder and Stoughton, 1966) and focused on a day in the life of a young Melbourne antique dealer and his immature friend, Friedlander. The characters, transplanted to London, were further chronicled in "Rappaport's Revenge" (1973). Lurie's self-exile from Australia to Europe, the UK and Northern Africa provides much of the material for his fiction. His second novel was "The London Jungle Adventures of Charlie Hope" (Hodder and Stoughton, 1968). "Flying Home" (1978) was named by the National Book Council as one of the ten best Australian books of the decade. Subsequent novels are "Seven Books for Grossman" (1983)—really a novella parodying the styles of various authors—and "Madness" (1991), about a writer dealing with a mentally unstable girlfriend.
Lurie is best known for his short stories. In 2000 he wrote an instructional guide "When and How to Write Short Stories and What They Are". His stories have been 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".
In his 2008 novel, "To Light Attained", Lurie deals with the subject of suicide. His daughter Rachel had died by suicide in 1993, aged 23.A review of the novel described it as "a father's anguish in words".
Lurie succumbed to cancer on 8 October 2014, at the Wantirna Hospice.
Works.
Novels and short story collections
Essays and journalism
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.