John Purcell

John Purcell (born 1972) is an Australian author whose novels include The Secret Lives of Emma (under the pseudonym Natasha Walker) published by Penguin Random House in 2012 and The Girl on the Page, published by HarperCollins Australia in October 2018. He is also the Director of Books at Booktopia (Australia's largest online bookseller) and Angus & Robertson Bookworld. He appears regularly in print, on television and at Australian writers' festivals to talk about books and the publishing industry.

Early life

John Purcell was born in Sydney and grew up in the wealthy lower-north-shore suburb of Mosman. He attended Mosman High School and was in his final months of school when his teachers figured out he could barely read due to undiagnosed dyslexia. 'Then a teacher put a copy of Catch-22 in my hands and that changed my life,' John has said. He still failed his exams but had fallen in love with books.

Career as a bookseller

From 1999-2008, John owned and ran John's Bookshop, a second-hand bookshop located in Mosman. He has described this period of his life as his 'education' as a writer and says he spent more time reading and writing than selling books. John has written about the extreme contrast between his two experiences of being a bookseller: 'Since leaving the second-hand bookshop I have become unrecognisable to myself. I have become the book guy at Australia's fastest growing online bookshop. I have published a series of erotic novels under a pseudonym. I have met and interviewed hundreds of authors and celebrities. I have worked closely with every major publisher in the country. And I rarely read a book by a dead person.' John wrote a fuller version in his twenties, drawing inspiration from Henry Miller's graphic realism, Caroline Overington broke the story of John's identity in The Australian Women's Weekly in May 2013,

The Lessons Purcell's third book, The Lessons, was published by Fourth Estate in 2022.