David Balderstone lived & worked as a writer, journalist & broadcaster in Australia, Britain, the Middle East, and The Philippines.
David Balderstone
His latest book, Shining the Boot of a Nation: A Portrait of Egypt after Nasser (eBook 2014), derives from when he first lived in Cairo as a freelance writer in 1970. He arrived in Cairo just before the death of President Gamal Abdul Nasser. He wrote the book in 1971 as an eyewitness account of the events surrounding Nasser’s death and the subsequent rise to power of Anwar Sadat, interspersed with the observed but partly fictional story of the lives of local people. This is a record of Egyptian society and politics in the early 1970s, with colourful descriptions of life on the streets of Cairo and Luxor. Although then unpublished, it was shortlisted for a young writers’ award organised by Britain’s New English Library in the early 1970s.
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His second novel, The Baghdad Chameleon (The Poppy Press Australia), published in 2012 explores – in part – the elusiveness of truth in the Middle East, where half-truths and speculation often replace hard facts. As noted by Ed Wright in The Australian Review, David Balderstone provides another view of a region where the news diet is primarily pictures of violence and Islamic extremism.
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His first novel, A Road from Damascus (The Poppy Press Australia), was published in 1992, and received favourable reviews in a number of Australian publications, including The Age, The Bulletin and The Sydney Morning Herald. In 1996, the Cairo publisher, Al Akhbar al Yom, published the novel in Arabic.
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Dead Reckoning, a play in two acts (The Poppy Press Australia), was first performed as a public reading in 1998 by the Melbourne Writers’ Theatre at the Comedy Club in Carlton. Al Spencer, former Australian politician turned business man, aspires to make a fortune in Asia. But just as his venture – a boutique hotel in the Southern Philippines – is on the verge of opening, his political past comes back to haunt him.
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Middle East Encounters (The Poppy Press Australia) is a collection of his articles published in ‘The Age’ and ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’ 1977-1984 interspersed with extracts from letters home. As reviewers of David’s books have noted, he developed an intimate knowledge of more than merely the politics of the area. The conversations he had with people coloured his depiction of events and sometimes found their way into his articles. Summing up his six years covering the area, David made some chilling predictions that have proved remarkably prescient.
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