The Short of It
Benjamin D. Muir is a reformed juvenile delinquent born in and writing on unceded Dharug land (Penrith). He is a prize-winning writer, casual academic, teacher, researcher, and six-time failed metalcore musician. His novel, The McMillan Diaries, forthcoming from Kith Books in 2024, was the recipient of the 2019 AAWP/UWAP Meniscus Chapter One Prize.
His work has appeared in SBS Australia, Studio Stories via FBI Radio’s Or It Didn’t Happen, Antipodean Science Fiction, The Conversation, Affirmations: of the Modern and several anthologies.
He holds a doctorate from Western Sydney University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. His thesis was on depictions of grief and trauma in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
For Those with Time to Kill
Benjamin D. Muir is a reformed juvenile born in and writing on unceded Dharug land (Penrith). He is interested in the relationships between horror, grief, trauma, form, historiography, satire, and philosophical pessimism. His work is highly metafictional, oscillating between high farce, Menippean satire, and oppressive philosophical horror. It has been compared to Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Borges, Sebald, Ellis, and Danielewski.
Benjamin’s forthcoming novel, The McMillan Diaries, was the recipient of the 2019 AAWP/UWAP Chapter One Prize. His work has been read and published in SBS Australia, Studio Stories via FBI Radio’s Or It Didn’t Happen, Antipodean Science Fiction, The Conversation, Affirmations: of the Modern and several anthologies. One of his articles for SBS Voices, I’m a Writer, An Academic and a Trolley Boy went viral twice and was adapted into an episode of SBS’s podcast, Let me Tell You, which won Australian Arts and Culture Podcast of the Year, 2022.
He is an alumnus of WestWords Academy, 2020, and WSU’s The Writing Zone, 2021.
He holds a doctorate from Western Sydney University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. His thesis is comprised of his aforementioned novel and an exegesis on grief and trauma in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. He was interviewed for House of Leaves‘ twentieth anniversary in The Guardian.
His debut novel, The McMillan Diaries, was acquired by Kith Books, and is scheduled for launch in 2024.
You can find Benjamin here, or at:
Benjamin D. Muir 