Peter Greste

Professor Peter Greste is an Australian-born journalist, author, media freedom activist and academic at Macquarie University. Before joining academia in 2018, he spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent, starting with the civil war in Yugoslavia and elections in South Africa. He joined the BBC as its Afghanistan correspondent in 1995 and went on to cover Latin America, the Middle East and Africa where he moved to Al Jazeera.  

He hit the headlines himself in December 2013, when he and two colleagues were arrested in Cairo on terrorism charges. They were convicted and sentenced to seven years in a case widely condemned as an attack on press freedom. Under enormous pressure, Egypt released Peter and he went on to become a champion of press freedom around the world.

His stance has earned him numerous awards, including the Australian Human Rights Commission Medal, the RSL’s 2016 ANZAC Peace Prize, and Australian Press Council’s 2018 Press Freedom award.His book, The Correspondent, is an updated version of The First Casualty, originally published in 2017 exploring his time in prison and the wider ‘war on journalism’. It has been re-released to coincide with a major movie about his Egypt experience, starring Richard Roxburgh.