Peter Robb

Peter Robb (born 1946) is an Australian author, who has also written under the pen names B. Selkie and Ross Edwards.

Early life and education Robb was born 1946 in Toorak, Melbourne. He spent his early years in Australia and was educated in New Zealand.

He was involved in a small Trotskyist organisation named the Communist League, which was sympathetic to the Fourth International, between 1972 and 1978, although Robb did not join the organisation until 1975. and activist and later academic Marcia Langton was the third member of the CL committee. McCarthy broke away from the SWP (then Socialist Workers League) to create CL, and then, along with Robb and Langton, rejoined the SWP four years later, in November 1976.

Career Robb left Australia for Europe in 1971, where he worked for several years before returning home. In 1978, he moved to Italy and spent the next 15 years primarily in Naples and southern Italy, with occasional sojourns to Brazil. He returned to Sydney at the end of 1992. His experiences in southern Italy formed the basis of his first book, Midnight in Sicily (1996).

His 1998 biography of the Italian artist Caravaggio, titled M, provoked significant controversy upon its British release two years later. Robb denied he had plagiarised from Conti and responded: "It is normal practice for historians and journalists to draw on previous published sources for their own work, and correct practice to acknowledge and cite them. I do both. Facts are public property."

Academia Robb has taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oulu in Finland, and the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples.

Recognition and awards

1997: Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction (the non-fiction prize of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award), for Midnight in Sicily 2004: The Age Book of the Year Awards – Non-fiction, for A Death in Brazil 2012: Appointed the first CAL Non-Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Technology, Sydney.