John Silvester

John Silvester is a Walkley award winning Australian journalist, a well-respected crime reporter and a professional and highly regarded public speaker. John regularly addresses police, judicial, legal and corporate conferences. John is Victoria’s most experienced crime reporter and has covered the beat since the late 1970s.

John has written, edited and published crime books that have sold more than 1 million copies in Australia and has won industry awards for print, radio, television and on-line reporting.

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John has a Bachelor of Arts degree from La Trobe University. He has been a crime reporter in Melbourne since 1979 and was a long-standing chief police journalist for the Melbourne Sun. He has given evidence in Royal Commissions on crime and corruption.

John is the senior crime reporter for The Age and writes the Walkley Award winning Naked City column. He appears weekly on 3AW as crime commentator Sly of the Underworld.

John has co-authored several crime books, including the Underbelly True Crime Series, (with Andrew Rule) and has also written or co-written 15 bestselling crime books.

His work was adapted into the top rating Underbelly television series shown on Channel Nine and he has acted as presenter in a series of critically acclaimed television crime documentaries.

In 2007 he won the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year and was highly commended in the same award in 1998 and 2014.

In 2008 he was judged the Victoria Law Foundation Legal Reporter of the Year.

John has won eight Melbourne Press Club Quill awards, ten Victorian Law Foundation Awards, four Walkley Awards, a Ned Kelly Award for true crime writing and a Ned Kelly lifetime achievement award.

John has presented the ABC documentary Trigger Point, an in depth examination of police shootings in Victoria and Conviction – the Logie winning ABC special on the murder of Jill Meagher.

In 2018 he was elevated to the Australian Journalism Hall of Fame.