Author(s): Eric Campbell

Biography & Memoir

An award-winning journalist's gritty and compelling account of life reporting from the edge. As a foreign correspondent for ABC television, Eric Campbell covered Boris Yeltsin's drunken demise in Russia, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and the public madness in Britain following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. He's been arrested, drugged, robbed, stoned by the Taliban, threatened with expulsion from China and thrown into a variety of tricky situations - such as dating in Moscow and eating a sheep's head (while hung over) in Afghanistan. In 2003, while covering the war in Iraq, he was wounded in a suicide bombing which killed his cameraman and friend, Paul Moran. Absurdistan, Eric's first book, documents the highs and lows of being a reporter in some of the strangest, most dysfunctional places on Earth while juggling life, love, friendship and fatherhood. This is not a standard journalistic memoir: it's an irreverent, rollicking read which takes you into nightclubs as well as war zones, behind the scenes of grassroots revolution, as well as into centres of power.