Unholy War

Mark Willacy is the author of the book Rogue Forces, which exposed alleged war crimes by the Australian SAS in Afghanistan. Rogue Forces won the 2022 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. A former ABC Middle East and North Asia correspondent, Mark has reported for the ABC in more than 30 countries. He's a seven-time Walkley Award winner, and has been awarded Australia's highest honour in journalism — the Gold Walkley — for exposing an alleged war crime caught on camera. He's twice been named Queensland Journalist of the Year and in 2019 he won a Logie Award with Four Corners for his story on the Thai cave rescue. Mark has written three books.

Professor Peter Greste is an Australian-born journalist, author, media freedom activist and academic. He is a founding member of the advocacy group, the Alliance for Journalists Freedom and a regular contributor to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Conversation, and The Guardian.

Before joining academia in January 2018, he spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent, starting with the civil war in Yugoslavia and elections in South Africa as a freelance reporter in the early 90’s, before joining the BBC as its Afghanistan correspondent in 1995. He went on to cover Latin America, the Middle East and Africa for the BBC.

In 2011 he won a Peabody Award for a BBC documentary on Somalia before joining Al Jazeera as its East Africa correspondent later that year. In December 2013 he was covering Egypt on a short three-week assignment when he was arrested on terrorism charges. After a trial widely dismissed as a sham, he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.

In February the following year, after 400 days behind bars, and intense international campaign, he was deported under a presidential decree. As a result of the letters he wrote from prison in the defense of freedom of the press, he won a Walkley Award in Australia in 2014, and Royal Television Society and Tribeca Disruptive Innovator’s Awards in 2015.

He has also been awarded the International Association of Press Clubs’ Freedom of Speech Award; Liberty Victoria’s “Voltaire Award”, the Australian Human Rights Commission Medal (all in 2015), the RSL’s 2016 ANZAC Peace Prize, and the Australian Press Council’s 2018 Press Freedom award.

Peter has co-authored his family’s account of their struggle to get him out of Egypt, Freeing Peter, and written his own book on journalism and the War on Terror, The First Casualty published in 2017. He remains an avid advocate of media freedom and journalist safety.