Musgrave was born in Sydney and educated at Sydney University where in 1997 he received a Doctor of Philosophy for his thesis on the topic of Menippean satire. He is a descendant of William Witter and Hannah Churchman of Boston, whose descendents include Thomas Pynchon, Archibald MacLeish, Katharine Hepburn and the poets Francis Goddard Tuckerman and Henry Theodore Tuckerman. He is also an indirect descendant of the architect Edmund Blacket.
He worked for a number of years as a Chief Information Officer in the Health Insurance industry. He currently lectures in creative writing at the University of Newcastle. He has published numerous articles on Australian literature, including on Norman Lindsay"s The Magic Pudding and David Ireland"s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner.
He has also written on The Black Dog and Depression (published in Tracking the Black Dog by the Black Dog Institute and published articles on Samuel Beckett and the Ern Malley hoax.
His latest poetry collection is Concrete Tuesday, published by Island Press in 2011. His study on Menippean Satire in English since the Renaissance, "Grotesque Anatomies", was published by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2014 Mishearing is forthcoming from Gorilla Books in early 2015, and another collection, the book-length poem Anatomy of Voice is in preparation.
1986 - Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry for the poem Afternoon Ambience 1987 - Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry for the poem Budapest 1987 - Sydney University Prize for English Verse for the poem What I did on Sunday 1994 - Sidney Nolan Gallery Poetry Prize for the poem Glenrowan 2001 - Poets Union/Broadway Poetry Prize for the poem Lagoon 2003 - Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize for the poem Minneapolis 2004 - Shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award for To Thalia 2006 - Highly commended in the Newcastle Poetry Prize for the sequence Open Water 2008 - The Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize for the poem Grace 2008 - Newcastle Poetry Prize for the poem The Baby Boomers 2008 - Alec Bolton prize for the unpublished manuscript Phantom Limb 2010 - Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for Phantom Limb 2011 - Shortlisted for the Prime Minister"s Award for Fiction for Glissando: A Melodrama 2011 - Shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for new fiction for Glissando: A Melodrama 2012 - Shortlisted for the Blake PoetrybPrize for "Nine Crab Barn" 2012 - Newcastle Poetry Prize for the poem "Coastline".
He is also a board member of Australian Poetry Limited.
