Ern Malley

Who was Ern Malley?

Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. He and his entire body of work were created in one day in 1943 by writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax Max Harris and Angry Penguins, the modernist magazine Harris had founded and edited.

In the decades after their publication, the hoax had a negative effect on the cause of modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery and Robert Hughes.