When Mark Binelli first arrived in the tiny, rural Victorian town of Goroke, to interview Gerald Murnane for the New York Times, Murnane produced a piece of paper with three of his own questions: “Are you at all interested in golf?”; “Are you at all interested in horse racing?”; and “What do you propose to do for lunch?”

“You might feel like you’re being overorganized,” the 79-year-old author told Binelli, “but this is how I do things.”

The Times piece describes Murnane as one of “the greatest living English-language writer[s]”, and suggests the Australian writer might be a contender for the next Nobel Prize for literature – and yet he’s never won or been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the biggest literary prize in his Australia. He has published 13 books and developed a cult following in literary circles around the world, but most Australians have never heard of him. Why is that?

Murnane is a deeply eccentric character; as he told the Times, “I think you can probably see that I’m sane, but I say and believe things that insane people believe.” After the death of his wife of 43 years, he moved to Goroke – population 623 – where he proudly serves as the secretary of the local golf club. An academic conference about his writing was recently held at the venue where he tended bar during the lunch break.

The writer lives in a single room, where he sleeps on a folding cot among his “archives”, including filing cabinets full of notes, diaries, and early drafts of his books. These files have unusual titles: “I decide that most books are crap”; ; “My hatred for literary critics”, and: “Peter Carey exposed at last.”

Murnane prefers not to travel. He has never left Australia or flown in an aeroplane, he doesn’t appear at writers’ festivals, and has only ventured outside Victoria a handful of times. He has not watched TV or movies for decades, and has never used a computer – although he has recently acquired an iPhone on which he sends epistle-length text messages.

Instead, he spends his downtime with several complex games, which he’s developed and played throughout his adult life. The most famous of these is “the Antipodean Archive”. It’s a vast and complex horse-racing game set in two imaginary countries called New Eden and New Arcady.

Murnane has no sense of smell (to which he attributes his synesthetic perception of colour) and a prodigious memory. Before giving a recent talk, he recited every winner of the Melbourne Cup in order.

But save for a hiatus between 1995 and 2009, his writing has been prolific. Since publishing his first novel in 1974, he has produced seven more, as well as four short story collections and a memoir. An edition of his collected stories has just been published in Australia and in the US, and a book of collected poems will follow.

Murnane’s work tends to provoke strong responses – readers love it or hate it. Most of his novels lack the traditional elements of plot. They are meditative and almost closer to essays than fiction. He frequently returns to the same images and themes – horse racing, stained glass, marbles, religion, unrequited love, and the capacity of the imagination to surpass reality. His prose is not obviously experimental or difficult, and he always writes in complete sentences, but these sentences are often very long. Moreover, he approaches topics in an oblique manner, and the point of a piece of writing may only become clear at the end.

Murnane’s works also frequently refer to each other, which can be confusing for the uninitiated. The opening sentence of his new and allegedly final novel Border Districts, for instance, is almost identical to the opening sentence of his third and most famous novel, The Plains.

Published in 1982, The Plains is set in an alternate Australia whose centre is populated by wealthy and erudite people who live on grand estates and serve as patrons to artists and philosophers. The novel’s protagonist is an aspiring filmmaker who wants to capture the essence of the area. Drawing on the tradition of the utopian novel, The Plains describes – with varying degrees of irony – the lives of the plainsmen (they are mostly men) and their unusual mode of living. It’s an arresting work which derives its power partly from the beauty of its writing, which combines spareness, repetition, and evocative descriptions of place. But The Plains remains a classic because it inverts many of Australia’s conceptions about itself.

The Plains is also an unusual work for Murnane. His first two books, Tarmarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), were coming-of-age novels that drew on the author’s upbringing in a Catholic family whose circumstances were often strained by his father’s gambling debts. His later works are autobiographical in more complex ways: they often have narrators that closely resemble Murnane, who self-reflexively discuss their own process of telling stories. Because of this he was often erroneously compared with various postmodern, metafictional writers of his generation, but his writing shares little of their scepticism or relativism.

And while Murnane’s writing is contemplative, it tackles serious and often disturbing topics – mental illness, sexual assault, marital failures, intense loneliness, and alcohol dependency often lay just below the surface of what at first seem to be disinterested musings. What holds everything together is Murnane’s prose, which is by various turns dark, playful, and funny, often in the same sentence.

A great entry point is his 1989 short-story, When the Mice Failed to Arrive, which opens with a typically Murnanian sentence:

One afternoon in one of the years when I used to stay at home to mind my son and my daughter and to do the housework while my wife was away at her job, my son was caught in a thunderstorm.

Here the discussion of daily household duties is juxtaposed with a child in potential danger. In Murnane’s work, trauma and everyday experience are intertwined.

Will Murnane win the Nobel Prize? In fact, the writer has been a Nobel candidate for so long that among his archives are files of news stories written about the topic. While he’s never sold particularly well, he has a series of high profile literary admirers including JM Coetzee, Ben Lerner and Teju Cole. All of his works are currently in print and most have been published overseas. Border Districts is about to be published by the prestigious New York publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and UK publisher & Other Stories will soon be reissuing five of his books.

He remains beloved by a cult readership, and he seems to be attracting a new generation of fans – perhaps because Murnane’s work often blurs the line between fiction and autobiography in similar ways to contemporary literary writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante. Murnane is 79 and contemplating the end of his career as an author, but his work may be finding a larger audience now than it ever has.

• Gerald Murnane’s Collected Short Fiction is out in Australia through Giramondo Publishing, and in the US through Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who have also published Border Districts