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 46 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. Twenty-five years later, he won his second Walkley for a series of opinion pieces on the Israel-Gaza war: Not in my Jewish name  He has been a Walkley finalist on three other occasions in the categories of feature writing, coverage of Asia and sports reporting.

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 and Jerusalem-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 and the 2019 critically-acclaimed Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing – about gender relations in the age of #MeToo.

A Doctor of Creative Arts, David 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.Born in Montreal, David is a contributing writer to Good Weekend magazine and regular columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald. He also works as a keynote speaker, public interviewer, guest lecturer, writing mentor, and speech writer.

He has two daughters, Jordan, a singer-songwriter, and Hannah, a New York-based associate researcher, and he lives in Sydney.