Creekwater Journal, his first collection of poems, was released in 1973. Gray has been a writer-in-residence at Meiji University in Tokyo and various Australian universities, notably Geelong College in 1982. He has won the Adelaide Arts Festival, as well as the New South Wales and Victorian Premiers' Poetry Awards. Gray began writing poetry at the age of 21. His first collection, Creekwater Journal, was published by Hesperus Press in 1973. Since then he has gone on to publish several more books of poetry, including Recent Translations from Japanese Poets (1977), The Man with Night Sweats (1979), Selected Poems (1980), The Way through the Woods (1983), The Best of Robert Gray: 1970-1990 (1991), and The Star Diaries (1994). Gray has also written two novels, A High Wind from the North and Its Effect on Some Faraway Trees, and three books for children: The Day John Cusack Was Born, How William Bligh Created Australia, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He has also edited several other writers' works. In addition to his career as a poet, Gray has been a professor of English literature at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has also been a visiting writer at universities in Japan, Taiwan, and Germany. In 1982 he became the first Australian writer to be awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome.