Gordon Peake

Gordon Peake is an Irish-Australian who writes about places, people and the shenanigans that go on behind bureaucratic curtains. His critically acclaimed first book, Beloved Land: Stories, Struggles and Secrets from Timor-Leste (2014) was a winner of two Australian literary awards, with judges describing it as ‘a compelling work merging the personal with the historical … surprising, sometimes confronting and very poignant'. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the book’s mixture of ‘forthrightness and warmth, and knowledge, makes this book not simply informative but in a quiet way exemplary.’ His second book Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation (2022) is a story of his journeys in Bougainville, a collection of islands in Papua New Guinea hoping to strike out as a country of its own. He is presently writing a book about an influencer whose obsessive quest for followers took him into deadly territory in the Philippines.

Gordon's essays have focussed on topics as diverse as the singular miseries of being a diplomatic spouse to how personal relationships constitute the secret fuel which make bureaucracies either work or not. His writing has been published in a wide range of outlets including Aeon, the Guardian, Inside Story and Island magazine.

For more about Gordon Peake visit www.gordonpeake.com