Morris Lurie's parents, Arie and Esther Lurie, were Jewish, coming to Australia from Poland. They died when their son was in his early twenties. Lurie attended school at Elwood Central School, Prahran Technical School and Melbourne High School. He matriculated in 1956 with first class honours. Lurie then studied architecture the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and worked for a time in advertising before becoming a fulltime writer. He lived overseas in Greece, Denmark, Morocco and England, with frequent visits to New York, during the period 1967 to 1978. Lurie wrote over a hundred short stories, widely published in Australia and in overseas magazines and newspapers.
Lurie said that he grew up 'in a strange bubble of isolation' because of his parents' double alienation from Poland and from Australia. The protagonists of his novels are typically solitary, homeless or expatriate figures; the themes of his short stories are often concerned with unstable family relationships, mirroring in some way his own unhappy childhood. However, his writing also incorporates a humorous style, compared to that of American writers such as Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth, who shared Lurie's Jewish origins.
