Muir Holburn graduated from Sydney University in 1943 and won the Sydney University Poetry Prize in the same year. He joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1943 and was a journalist with the New South Wales Public Service for the period 1947 to 1959. Holburn was also the President of the Fellowship of Australian Writers between 1948 and 1950 and he remained on the Fellowship's executive committee until 1958.
Together with Majorie Pizer, whom he later married, Holburn established the Pinchgut Press in 1947. Some of Marjorie Pizer's poetry deals with her loss due to Holburn's early death.
