Alex Hammond

Alex Hammond (born 25 December 1975 in Johannesburg, South Africa) is an Australian crime fiction writer. He is also published under the name A. W. Hammond.

Life In 1981 he emigrated to Australia with his family. He graduated in Law/Arts from Melbourne University in 2001 and worked for several law firms before becoming an editor and web manager for the University of Melbourne and later RMIT University. The Emperor's Grace for issue 3, A World Above for issue 6, Ancient Lances for issue 11, and Rat in the Walls for issue 14. These were later republished in the anthology books Into the Maelstrom (1999), Status: Deadzone (2002) and Let the Galaxy Burn (2006).

His first novel, Blood Witness (Penguin 2013), is a contemporary crime thriller set in Melbourne featuring defence lawyer Will Harris. It was short-listed for a Ned Kelly Award for Australian Crime Writing in 2014. It and its sequel, The Unbroken Line (Penguin 2015) were optioned for a TV Series.

Of his third novel, The Paris Collaborator (Echo 2021), The Sydney Morning Herald said he "artfully constructs this historical thriller within a paranoid and desperate city, creating plenty of twist and tension." The novel is set during the German occupation of Paris and follows former schoolteacher Auguste Duchene as he searches for missing people in the days before the battle for the city's liberation. In its sequel The Berlin Traitor (Echo 2023), Duchene finds himself in post-war Berlin, involved in the hunt for a Nazi war criminal and relying on his wits to survive the beginnings of the Cold War. In the final to the trilogy, The Moscow Defector, Duchene becomes the target of Soviet Agents as he tries to find away out of the Berlin Blockade.