David Leser

David Leser is a multi-award winning journalist who has worked in Australia, North America, the Middle East, Europe and Asia for the past 40 years. He won the 1999 Walkely award for feature writing for his expose of Alan Jones in Good Weekend, called Who’s Afraid of Alan Jones. He has been a Walkley finalist on three other occasions in the categories of feature writing, coverage of Asia and sports reporting. He is also the recipient of a human rights commendation for journalism and three other national magazine awards for feature writing. David has worked as a feature writer for the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, HQ magazine, the Bulletin, Good Weekend, the Australian Women’s Weekly, Italian and German Vanity Fair, Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He has also worked as a Washington D.C, Jerusalem and Paris-based correspondent. David is the author of 7 books, including a memoir: To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father which was shortlisted for the 2015 National Biography Award. He is also editor of Paul Kelly: The Essays (2012), as well as Executive Producer of the award-winning Australian documentary Paul Kelly: Stories of Me. David’s new book Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing – about gender relations in the age of #MeToo – was published by Allen & Unwin on August 5, 2019. Born in Montreal, David also works as a public interviewer, guest lecturer, writing mentor, and speech writer. He has two daughters, Jordan, a singer-songwriter, and Hannah, a photographer, and lives in Sydney.