Roger Averill

Like the best true life adventures, the story of Werner Pelz is stranger than fiction. Forced to flee Nazi Germany for being Jewish, he was then interned in England for being German. Shipped to Australia on the notorious HMT Dunera, he spent two years in internment camps in Hay and Tatura. After returning to Britain, his life evolved into a...

Two young Australians arrive unannounced on a remote Melanesian island and ask its residents if they can live with them for a year. Granted this request, cut off from the outside world, living without electricity, telephones, running water, two-way radios or even access to an ocean-going boat, Roger Averill and his anthropologist partner adapt to life in a subsistence culture...

Michael and Marjorie Madigan refuse to be interviewed by biographer Sinclair Hughes for his new book, Inside the Lion's Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan. This is not surprising, as Gilbert is Marjorie's ex-husband and Michael's mostly absent father. In Roger Averill's brilliantly conceived new novel, Relatively Famous, Gilbert Madigan is Australia's first Booker Prize winner, a feted and...