I was born almost as far south in the world as you can get, in Hobart, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne where I went to school and university. After that I moved to London to do postgraduate work. 

That's where I wrote my doctorate on the Spanish Civil War and the genesis of modern war photography, at University College London, and afterwards joined Reuters, which trained me as a foreign correspondent and sent me abroad. 

I've worked as a reporter in London and Belfast, in Brussels and Amsterdam, in Mexico City and Paris. I’ve been lucky enough to have also spent longer or shorter periods of my life in Buenos Aires, Lübeck and parts of Greece, and embarked on travels that have taken me from the Sahara Desert to the Amazon, from the Arctic Circle to the island of Zanzibar. 

I wrote Hinterland in Paris, where I was working for the international edition of The New York Times. Paris was also where I wrote The Memory Stones, after researching the novel in Argentina, Greece and France. But for me the story began long before, in a conversation in La Condesa, in Mexico City…

These days I am working on two new novels while the theatre adaptation of Hinterland continues its international tour.