Mic Looby

Mic Looby is a Melbourne-based muser. He is also a writer and editor for The Age, a columnist for The Big Issue magazine and author of the satirical travel novel Paradise Updated.

Mic Looby was born in Windsor, NSW, in 1969. He studied journalism in Melbourne and spent several years as a Hong Kong-based illustrator and travel writer.

He also worked for many years as an editor and author for Lonely Planet Publications, contributing to many guidebooks to South-east Asia and Australia.

He is a regular columnist for The Big Issue magazine and has illustrated five children’s books. His work appears regularly in The Australian, The Age and the Herald Sun.

He lives in Melbourne and his first novel, Paradise Updated, was published in 2009. It was described by Patrick McCaughey in Australian Book Review as the “best rookie novel of the year - like early Waugh: comic with a sense of threat.”

Photograph: James Braund