Michael McGirr Michael McGirr i(A28452 works by)
Born: Established: 1961 ;
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

Michael McGirr was a Jesuit for twenty years and a Catholic priest for seven. McGirr was a founding staff member of Eureka Street and has been a regular newspaper columnist and reviewer for newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald. He was fiction editor of Meanjin from 2001-2005. In 2005 McGirr was the H. C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. In January 2007 McGirr moved to Melbourne to take up a position as head of faith and mission at St Kevin's College in Toorak.

In addition to numerous literary reviews and critical works, McGirr has published several titles on religious subjects: The Good Life: Stories of Faith and Life (2000), Unhinged Saints (1998) and Finding God's Traces (2004).

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • Other works by Michael McGirr not individually indexed include :

    Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep (2017)

    Ideas to Save Your Life : Philosophy for Wisdom, Solace and Pleasure (2021)

Personal Awards

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Books That Saved My Life : Reading for Wisdom, Solace and Pleasure Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2018 13940650 2018 selected work essay

'HERE are forty texts to read at some stage in your life: forty texts that can enrich you in all manner of ways. Some are recent, like Harry Potter; some ancient, like Homer and Lao Tzu. There are memoirs (Nelson Mandela), poetry (Les Murray) and many of the world’s great novels, from George Eliot’s Middlemarch to Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

'Our guide, in entertaining short essays about personal encounters with each of these works, is Michael McGirr: schoolteacher and former priest, reviewer of hundreds of novels and lifelong lover of literature. His humour and insight shine through in stories that connect the texts he has selected with each other, and connect us to them.

'Never prescriptive, and often very funny, this book is an invitation to reflect on—and share with others—the extraordinary gift of reading. ‘It is a gift that is taking me a lifetime to unwrap,’ McGirr writes. ‘The excitement has never worn off.''.

Source: Publisher's blurb.
2019 longlisted Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature
y separately published work icon Bypass : The Story of a Road Sydney : Picador , 2004 Z1136209 2004 single work prose travel

'Forty and flabby, Michael McGirr hits the Hume Highway on a cheap bicycle. Having stopped working as a Jesuit priest, he is on a quest to find heaven knows what. Along the way, he is joined by Jenny.

'Bypass is the story of Australia’s main street, the much-unloved highway between Sydney and Melbourne. The Hume has plenty of tales to tell—of bushrangers and bus drivers, publicans and poets, runners and refugees—and McGirr discovers he has one to add to the swag. The road is a source of wisdom and comedy, and maybe even a fine romance.

'One of the most popular books by the author of Things You Get For Free and Books that Saved My Life, Bypass is both a personal memoir and an unconventional biography of the road most travelled. This edition includes ‘Passing By’, a new afterword bringing the story up to date.'  (Publication summary: 2022)
2005 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — Award for Non-Fiction
y separately published work icon Things You Get for Free Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2000 Z668627 2000 single work autobiography travel 'At the age of thirty-four, Michael McGirr decides to take his charming and inimitable mum on the honeymoon she and her late husband never got around to having. Between recounting their hilarious travels around Europe and meditating on the historical figures who dot their voyage — everyone from Hemingway to Michelangelo to the quietly heroic people who inspire McGirr's special brand of faith — he plunges deep into his family history, unearthing sickness and depression but also moments of great love and perseverance.

'Things You Get for Free is a deeply moving spiritual and intellectual journey that sparkles with McGirr's singular wit and proves the truth behind his mother's favourite saying: "I know more than you think I know."' (From the Scribe website, abstract for 2012 edition.)
2001 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
2000 shortlisted Australian Booksellers Association Awards — BookPeople Book of the Year
VIEW ALL AWARDS
Last amended 14 Jul 2021 05:35:09
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