Richard Fidler

Richard Fidler is a writer and broadcaster. For more than a decade now he presented his national radio show Conversations with Richard Fidler, an in-depth, hour-long interview program on ABC Radio.

Richard has interviewed prime ministers, astronauts, writers and scientists, but the program often features remarkable people who are unknown to the wider world. The program attracts a large listening audience around the nation and is the most popular podcast in Australia.

In another life Richard was a member of the confrontational music/comedy trio The Doug Anthony Allstars (DAAS), which played to audiences all over the world – from the West End of London, to the streets of Paris and New York, to isolated mining towns in outback Australia.

Richard, Paul McDermott and Tim Ferguson were students in Canberra when they formed DAAS as a busking group. They brought their act into small venues across Australia, where they frequently performed encores in the venues’ toilets, cramming the audience into a tiny and oddly intimate space.

After DAAS broke up in 1994, Richard went on to present several television programs for ABC TV, including Race Around the World and Aftershock, a series on radical emerging technologies.

Richard began on Conversations in 2005, collaborating with senior producer Pam O’Brien. Conversations was soon taken up by ABC Radio stations across Australia and across two networks, and has since become a national institution, generating millions of program downloads every month.

In 2011, a Churchill Fellowship brought Richard to the US and the UK to meet up with the people behind some outstanding public radio shows, including This American Life with Ira Glass, and Jay Allison, creator of The Moth Radio Hour.

Richard’s first non-fiction book Ghost Empire was released in July 2016. Ghost Empire blends travel memoir with history, following his journey into Istanbul with his fourteen-year-old son Joe, to uncover the history of Constantinople, the lost capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Ghost Empire became a best-seller and has been published in the U.S., China and Europe.

In December 2016, Richard travelled to Iceland for the arctic winter to write, research and embark on further adventures. The result was a handsome book, Saga Land, published by HarperCollins.

This was followed by Richard’s most ambitious book yet: The Golden Maze, a history of the city of Prague, inspired by his experience of that city’s passionate and glorious Velvet Revolution of 1989.

Richard’s most recent book is The Book of Roads & Kingdoms: a compendium of stories of medieval travellers who left medieval Baghdad to explore the furthest reaches of the known world.