David Leser is a multi-award winning journalist who has worked in Australia, North America, the Middle East, Europe and Asia for the past 40 years.
He won the 1999 Walkely award for feature writing for his expose of Alan Jones in Good Weekend, called Who’s Afraid of Alan Jones. He has been a Walkley finalist on three other occasions in the categories of feature writing, coverage of Asia and sports reporting. He is also the recipient of a human rights commendation for journalism and three other national magazine awards for feature writing.
David has worked as a feature writer for the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, HQ magazine, the Bulletin, Good Weekend, the Australian Women’s Weekly, Italian and German Vanity Fair, Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
He has also worked as a Washington D.C, Jerusalem and Paris-based correspondent.
David is the author of 7 books, including a memoir: To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father which was shortlisted for the 2015 National Biography Award. He is also editor of Paul Kelly: The Essays (2012), as well as Executive Producer of the award-winning Australian documentary Paul Kelly: Stories of Me.
David’s latest book Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing – about gender relations in the age of #MeToo – was published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in August, 2019, and then in the United States in 2021 by Pegasus Books.
Born in Montreal, David is a senior contributing writer to Good Weekend magazine and also works as a public interviewer, guest lecturer, writing mentor, and speech writer. He has two daughters, Jordan, a singer-songwriter, and Hannah, a photographer, and lives in Sydney.
Testimonials
One of our finest longform journalists – certainly our deepest – dives into the treacherous waters of MeToo (and then some) and emerges with something so timely, connecting and regularly sublime that it feels like it was written as much for my mates and I as it was for my daughters. Resolutely human. Utterly essential. Wholly unputdownable.
I want to hire a plane and air-drop this book onto footy ovals, board-rooms, electoral offices and boys’ schools.
If you are a mum of a boy, I think you need to read this book. If you are the mum of a girl, I think you need to read this book. If you are a woman, I think you need to read this book. If you are a man, I think you need to read this book. Especially, if you are a man, I think you need to read this book. And if you think you don’t need to read this book, I think you need to read this book. Please. Please. Read this book.
Staggering in its range and depth. A landmark book.
I started reading this book with my heart in my mouth and finished it with a sense of profound relief. At last, a man has listened and understood. David Leser has taken women, their lives, their pain, their fears and their desires as seriously as he takes his own. It is all we ask.