Peter Temple

Who is Peter Temple?

Peter Temple is an Australian crime fiction writer. A journalist and journalism lecturer, he moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1980 and in 1982 moved to Melbourne to become the founding editor of Australian Society magazine. He later played a significant role in establishing the professional editing course at RMIT, Melbourne. He is married to Anita and has an adult son, Nicholas. He now lives in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.

Temple turned to fiction writing in the 1990s. His Jack Irish novels are set in Melbourne, Australia, and feature an unusual lawyer-gambler protagonist. In 2012, the Australian ABC Television and the German ZDF produced the first two as feature-length films with Guy Pearce in the title role under the series title Jack Irish. Temple has also written three stand-alone novels: An Iron Rose, Shooting Star, In the Evil Day, as well as The Broken Shore and its semi-sequel, Truth.

In 2010, Peter Temple won the Miles Franklin Award for his novel Truth. He has also won five Ned Kelly Awards for crime fiction, the most recent in 2006 for The Broken Shore, which also won the Colin Roderick Award for best Australian book and the Australian Book Publishers' Award for best general fiction. The Broken Shore also won the Crime Writers' Association Duncan Lawrie Dagger in 2007. Temple is the first Australian to win a Gold Dagger.