Michael Robotham

Two-times Gold Dagger winner (2015 and 2020), twice Edgar best novel finalist (2016 and 2020), and winner of the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger (2021), Michael Robotham was born in Australia in November 1960 and grew up in small country towns that had more dogs than people and more flies than dogs. He escaped and became a cadet journalist for an afternoon newspaper in Sydney. 

For the next fourteen years, he worked for newspapers and magazines in Australia, Europe, Africa, and America. As a senior feature writer for the UK’s Mail on Sunday, he was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Empress Alexandra, unearthed in the Moscow State Archives in 1991. He also gained access to Stalin’s Hitler files, which had been missing for nearly fifty years until a cleaner stumbled upon a cardboard box that had been misplaced and misfiled. 

In 1993 he quit journalism to become a ghostwriter, collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, adventurers, and showbusiness personalities to write their autobiographies. Twelve of these non-fiction titles have been bestsellers with combined sales of more than 2 million copies. His first novel, 'THE SUSPECT,' a psychological thriller, was chosen by the world’s largest consortium of book clubs as only the fifth “International Book of the Month,” making it the top recommendation to 28 million book club members in fifteen countries. 

Since then, Michael's psychological thrillers have been translated into twenty-five languages, and his Joe O'Loughlin series is currently in development for TV by World Productions. A six-part TV series based upon his standalone novel THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS was aired on BBC1 in 2020, and a second series will begin filming in 2021. Michael lives in Sydney with his wife and a diminishing number of dependent daughters.