15 Facts About John Birmingham

John Birmingham was born on 7 August 1964 and is a British-born Australian author, known for the 1994 memoir He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, the Axis of Time trilogy, and the well-received space opera series, the Cruel Stars trilogy.

John Birmingham received his higher education at St Edmund's College in Ipswich and at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

John Birmingham returned to Queensland to study law but he did not complete his legal studies, choosing instead to pursue a career as an author.

John Birmingham has a degree in international relations and currently lives in Brisbane.

John Birmingham was first published in Semper Floreat, the student newspaper at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, writing a series of stories featuring a fictional character named Commander Harrison Biscuit.

John Birmingham's first paid published work appeared in a student magazine at the University of Queensland.

John Birmingham won a young writers award for the Independent, which was edited by Brian Toohey and wrote a number of articles for Rolling Stone and Australian Penthouse magazines.

In 1994, John Birmingham released his sharehouse living memoir He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, which has since been turned into a play, film, and a graphic novel.

John Birmingham has written two Quarterly Essays Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy and A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power.

John Birmingham is a regular contributor Archived 10 August 2009 at the Wayback Machine to The Monthly, an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts.

In September 2006, John Birmingham wrote a piece in The Australian lambasting Germaine Greer for an article she had written in The Guardian about Steve Irwin shortly after his death.

John Birmingham described Greer's comments as "a poisonous discharge of bile".

Portions of John Birmingham's article were later quoted in the Parliament of New South Wales.

In 2015, John Birmingham parted ways with the traditional tradebook publishing business by becoming his own publisher after his Australian publisher's decision to release his Dave Hooper series several months prior to the release of the same books in the much larger North American and European markets instead of the near simultaneous global release that was used for the release his previous works.

One of these books was originally set to be released in Australia in 2008, but John Birmingham instead wrote Without Warning.