Penguin Books Australia

Photo credit: copyright Patrick Jones Studio

Bob Ellis is the author of twenty-one books, fifty-five screenplays, two hundred poems, five hundred political speeches, a hundred songs and two thousand film reviews. His most recent works, And So It Went: Night Thoughts in a Year of Change, The Capitalism Delusion and One Hundred Days of Summer, were published within ten months of each other in 2009 and 2010. Previous titles include the bestselling Goodbye Jerusalem, Goodbye Babylon, So It Goes, Night Thoughts in Time of War, The Season, The Hewson Tapes and Letters to the Future. His 1998 book on economics, First Abolish the Customer, was, as we say now, on the money.

He co-wrote the classic films Newsfront, Fatty Finn, Man of Flowers and Goodbye Paradise. He is the co-author of the musical play The Legend of King O'Malley, the television miniseries The True Believers and the Ben Chifley play A Local Man. He wrote and directed the feature films Unfinished Business and The Nostradamus Kid and wrote and appeared in the documentary Bastards from the Bush about his long friendship with Les Murray, and Run Rabbit Run, a film about Mike Rann. His film work has won numerous, nominations and awards for writing and direction, including three Premier's Literary Awards, three AFIs, five AWGIES and a Critics' Circle Award. He has been for forty years a contentious essayist and critic, and in 2002 was voted Columnist of the Year by the Magazine Publishers Association.

He has had a long and close involvement with politics, covering as a journalist twenty-five campaigns in Australia, the UK, the US, and writing speeches for Kim Beazley, Bob Carr, Mike Rann, Nathan Rees and Kamahl. In 1994 he stood as an Independent against Bronwyn Bishop, who was then thought likely to lead the Liberal Party, and gained with her political puncturing a bumptious, edgy, enduring national fame.