Nobel favourite Gerald Murnane: ‘Shakespeare is too much of a know-all for my liking’

Gerald Murnane is holding up for my inspection a symbol of the erratic nature of his career: one of the few extant copies of his 1995 novel Emerald Blue. “It only sold about 500 copies. The rest were pulped. But because of what’s happened, that’s worth nearly 1,000 [Australian] dollars now,” he says, with pardonable pride.