Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 16 July
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Due to a change in work schedule, our PEN Lecture with Peter Greste will now take place on Monday 16 July.
Since 9/11, the number of journalists who have been imprisoned for their work has risen steadily. In 2017, a record number were behind bars – most for crimes against the state such as treason, sedition or terrorism.
Academic and journalist Peter Greste, who was himself imprisoned in Egypt on terrorism charges, examines the way press freedom has steadily eroded to its worst point this century – and how Australia’s new national security laws are a troubling continuation of that trend.
This event will be Auslan interpreted.
Presented in partnership with PEN Melbourne and PEN Sydney.
Dymocks Camberwell will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Peter Greste
Professor Peter Greste is an Australian-born journalist, author, media freedom activist and academic. He is a founding member of the advocacy group, the Alliance for Journalists Freedom, and the UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland. He is also a regular contributor to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Conversation and The Guardian.
Before joining the university in January 2018, he spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent, starting with the civil war in Yugoslavia and elections in South Africa as a freelance reporter in the early '90’s, before joining the BBC as its Afghanistan correspondent in 1995. He went on to cover Latin America, the Middle East and Africa for the BBC.
In 2011 he won a Peabody Award for a BBC documentary on Somalia before joining Al Jazeera as its East Africa correspondent later that year. In December 2013 he was covering Egypt on a short three-week assignment when he was arrested on terrorism charges. After a trial widely dismissed as a sham, he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In February the following year, after 400 days behind bars and an intense international campaign, he was deported under a presidential decree. As a result of the letters he wrote from prison in the defense of freedom of the press, he won a Walkley Award in Australia in 2014, and Royal Television Society and Tribeca Disruptive Innovator’s Awards in 2015.
He has also been awarded the International Association of Press Clubs’ Freedom of Speech Award; Liberty Victoria’s 'Voltaire Award', the Australian Human Rights Commission Medal (all in 2015), the RSL’s 2016 ANZAC Peace Prize, and the Australian Press Council’s 2018 Press Freedom award.
Peter has co-authored his family’s account of their struggle to get him out of Egypt, Freeing Peter, and written his own book on journalism and the War on Terror, The First Casualty published in 2017. He remains an avid advocate of media freedom and journalist safety.