Gideon Haigh Bio

Gideon Haigh started young and never stopped. He began his career as a journalist, writing on business for The Age newspaper from 1984 to 1992 and for The Australian from 1993 to 1995, which means he was a teenager when he walked through the doors of The Age. What followed over the next four decades is one of the more productive careers in Australian literary non-fiction.

He was educated at Trinity College at the University of Melbourne, and that grounding complemented a street-level journalist’s instinct: Haigh writes with scholarly precision but never loses the reader in it. His prose has been praised as much for its energy as for its accuracy, and The Guardian called him “the most gifted cricket essayist of his generation” and described his work as “utterly addictive… cricket writing as art.”

Cricket sits at the heart of the Haigh catalogue, but it’s far from the whole of it. His historical cricket works include The Cricket War and The Summer Game, and he’s written two biographies, The Big Ship (of Warwick Armstrong) and Mystery Spinner (of Jack Iverson); the latter was the Cricket Society’s Book of the Year, was short-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, and was dubbed “a classic” by The Sunday Times. He’s also written about the humbler end of the game: Many a Slip, a humorous diary of a club cricket season, and The Vincibles, his account of the South Yarra Cricket Club, of which he is a life member and perennial vice-president.

The cricket writing alone would have established his reputation. The Cricket War (Text Publishing, 1993), his account of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket revolution in the late 1970s, was the book that announced him. The Times later listed it as one of the fifty greatest sports books, a list compiled in 2010, seventeen years after publication, by which point the book had simply kept its standing.

He’s won the annual Jack Pollard Trophy for the best Australian cricket book six times, with wins spanning more than a decade: the Trophy went to The Cricket War in 1994, to The Summer Game in 1998, to Mystery Spinner in 2000, and to The Big Ship in 2002. On Warne (2012), his study of Shane Warne as cricketer, celebrity, and cultural phenomenon, gathered the most concentrated cluster of honours: it won the British Sports Book Awards Best Cricket Book of the Year Award, the Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year Award, the Jack Pollard Trophy, and the Waverley Library Nib Award. Mike Atherton called it “a superb portrait of the most brilliant cricketer of his generation.”

Business writing has run alongside the cricket throughout his career. He’s published several books on business-related topics, including The Battle for BHP, Asbestos House (which details the James Hardie asbestos controversy), and Bad Company, an examination of the CEO phenomenon. Asbestos House (Scribe, 2005) won both the Harry Williams Prize for Promoting Public Debate at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and the Gleebooks Prize at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. The Office: A Hardworking History, published in 2012 by Melbourne University Publishing, traced the social and architectural history of the office as a working environment and won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, a book that takes a subject that seems dry on paper and finds genuine human drama inside it.

His true crime work arrived later, and with considerable force. Certain Admissions: A Beach, a Body and a Lifetime of Secrets (Viking, 2015) reconstructed a 1949 Melbourne murder case. On a warm evening in December 1949, two young people met by chance under the clocks at Flinders Street railway station; the next morning, one of them, twenty-year-old typist Beth Williams, was found dead on Albert Park Beach. The book weaves together real-life police procedural, courtroom drama, family saga, investigative journalism, social history, and archival research into a meditation on how the past shapes the present. It won the Ned Kelly Award for Best True Crime at the 2016 Australian Crime Writers Association Ned Kelly Awards, and was also highly commended at the Fellowship of Australian Writers Awards.

Haigh was appointed editor of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack Australia for 1999-2000 and 2000-01. Since March 2006, he’s been a regular panellist on the ABC television sports panel show Offsiders. He also contributes to The Monthly and earned the John Curtin Prize for Journalism in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2006 for his essay “Information Idol: How Google is making us stupid,” published in that magazine.

His most personal book arrived in 2024. In January of that year, during a period of personal crisis, Haigh abruptly started writing the story of the night his seventeen-year-old brother Jasper was killed, finally facing how it had shaped the rest of his life. He’d published over fifty books on various topics before that point; My Brother Jaz was the first about himself. Published by Melbourne University Press in September 2024, the memoir is, by any measure, a departure, dark, raw, and revealing in ways his earlier work had never been, telling the story of how it feels to lose someone, and yourself, even as the rest of the world turns.

His work has won premier’s literary awards in three states, two Waverley Library prizes for non-fiction, seven Australian Cricket Society literary awards, and a Ned Kelly Award for true crime. Across all of that, his method has stayed consistent: original archival research, a journalist’s sense of story, and prose that earns the reader’s attention on every page.