Michael Robotham

Michael Robotham was born in Australia in November 1960, and spent his early years growing up in country towns. In 1979 he became a cadet journalist with the Sydney Sun.

For the next fourteen years he worked for newspapers in Australia, Britain and America. As a senior feature writer for the UK’s Mail on Sunday he was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra, unearthed in the Moscow State Archives in 1991. He also gained access to Stalin’s Hitler files, which had been missing for nearly fifty years until a cleaner stumbled upon a cardboard box that had been misplaced and misfiled.

In 1993 he gave up journalism and become a sought after ghost writer, collaborating with many famous people to write their autobiographies. He wrote 14 titles in 10 years and has been sworn to secrecy for many of them (ones he can mention include Rolf Harris, Geri Halliwell, Lulu and Tony Bullimore). Twelve of these non-fiction titles were bestsellers with combined sales of more than 2 million copies.

He wrote his first novel The Suspect, in 2005 and it was so successful that it has been translated into seventeen languages. Lost, his second novel, I reviewed on this program in 2007 and that won the Ned Kelly Award for the Crime Book of the Year in 2005, given by the Australian Crime Writers Association. It was also short listed for the 2006 Barry Award for the Best British Novel Published in 2005. Since then he has written The Night Ferry and Shatter, both of which were short listed for a UK crime Writers association Steel Dagger award. In 2010, his book Bleed for me was short listed for the 2010 Ned Kelly award.

Authors Website: http://michaelrobotham.com/