Acclaimed and awarded Australian author, screenwriter, former political adviser, and speechwriter Don Watson is well known for his satirical screenwriting for Max Gillies, speeches for the Victorian premier John Cain and adviser and speechwriter for Prime Minister Paul Keating.
Don Watson was educated in a country high school and at La Trobe and Monash universities. After completing a Ph.D in 1976 he taught history and politics before leaving academia and becoming a freelance writer.
Over the past forty years Watson's articles, essays and reviews on politics, history and culture have appeared in most major Australian journals and newspapers. His books include acclaimed best-sellers, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002), Death Sentence(2003) and Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words(2004); American Journeys(2008), Bendable Learnings(2010), The Bush (2014), Worst Words(2015) and A Single Tree(2016). He wrote Enemy Within, a Quarterly Essay on the 2016 US Presidential Election. Don Watson is a regular writer for The Monthly.
He has twice won The Age Book of the Year, in addition to the National Biography Award, the Courier-Mail Book of the Year, the Alfred Deakin Essay Prize, the Australian Literary Studies Association Book of the Year, a Walkley Award, the New South Wales Premier’s Award, the Queensland Literary Award, and the Independent Booksellers Book of the Year (twice). In 2011 Don Watson was awarded the Phillip Hodgins Medal for Australian Literature.
His recent book The Passion of Private White, describes the meeting of two worlds: the world of the fiercely driven biologist and anthropologist Neville White, and the world of the hunter-gatherer clans of remote northern Australia he studied and lived with.
