Young Hawke

David Day has written more than twenty books to great acclaim. Apart from eight political biographies, including prize-winning biographies of John Curtin and Ben Chifley, he has written several books about the Second World War and others on Antarctica. He has won or been shortlisted for several literary prizes, including the South Australian Festival Prize for Literature, the National Biography Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Prize, the NSW Premier’s History Award, the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies National Awards, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Fellowship of Australian Writers Book of the Year. A graduate of Melbourne and Cambridge universities, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, he has been a research fellow at Clare College in Cambridge, a visiting fellow at Churchill College in Cambridge, a professor of history at University College Dublin, a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, and a visiting fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He has served as the official historian of the Australian Customs Service and the Bureau of Meteorology, and been an Australian Research Council senior research fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he is currently based.