1. Early life and education
    Protest arrest 

2. Career
    Writing  Axis of Time  Disappearance series 

3. Works
    Non-fiction  Fiction  Axis of Time Series  The Disappearance Series  The David Hooper Trilogy (also known as Dave Vs. The Monsters)  A Girl In Time Series  Short stories 

4. See also

5. References

6. External links

John Birmingham (born 7 August 1964) is a British-born Australian author, known for the 1994 memoir He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, and his Axis of Time trilogy.

Early life and education

Birmingham was born in Liverpool, United Kingdom, but grew up in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia, having moved to the country with his parents in 1970. Birmingham received his higher education at Saint Edmund's College in Ipswich and at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Birmingham's only stint of full-time employment was as a researcher at the Australian Department of Defence but he has worked for the television program A Current Affair.

Protest arrest

While a law student, Birmingham was one of the last people arrested under the state's Anti Street March legislation. Birmingham was convicted of displaying a sheet of paper with the words 'Free Speech' written on it in very small type. The local newspaper carried a photograph of him being frogmarched off to a waiting police van.{{citation needed|date=September 2014}}

Career

Birmingham returned to Queensland to study law but he did not complete his legal studies, choosing instead to pursue a career as an author. Birmingham has a degree in international relations and currently lives in Brisbane.^[1][2]

Writing

Birmingham was first published in Semper Floreat, the student newspaper at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, writing a series of stories featuring a fictional character named Commander Harrison Biscuit. His first paid published work appeared in a student magazine at the University of Queensland.^[3] He won a young writers award for the Independent, which was edited by Brian Toohey and wrote a number of articles for Rolling Stone and Australian Penthouse magazines.

In 1994 Birmingham released his sharehouse living memoir He Died with a Felafel in His Hand,^[4] which has since been turned into a play,^[4] film and a graphic novel. The sequel is The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco (Duffy and Snellgrove, 1997),^[5] the theatrical version of which was written and produced by 36 unemployed actors. In 2011 it was the longest running stage play in Australian history.^[6] In 2014, three Brisbane filmmakers sought funds to make a film version via crowdfunding.^[5]

Other works by him include The Search for Savage Henry, a crime novel featuring the character Harrison Biscuit, How To Be A Man, a semi-humorous guide to contemporary Australian masculinity and Off One's Tits, a collection of essays and articles previously published elsewhere. He also spent four years researching the history of Sydney for Leviathan: the unauthorised biography of Sydney (Random House, 1999, {{ISBN|0-09-184203-4}}). It won Australia's National Prize For Non-Fiction in 2002. In 2010, the Sydney Theatre Company create a play based upon the non-fiction book Leviathan that focus on the dark side of the evolution of the city of Sydney.^[7]

He has also written two small pocket books The Felafel Guide to Getting Wasted (2002) and The Felafel Guide to Sex (2002) which feature advice Birmingham has received over the years regarding those two subjects. He also wrote the nonfiction book "Dopeland" which examined Australia's cannabis culture.

Birmingham has written two Quarterly Essays (Black Inc. an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd) Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy and A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power. He is also a regular contributor to The Monthly, an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts.

In September 2006, Birmingham wrote a piece in The Australian lambasting Germaine Greer for an article she'd written in The Guardian about Steve Irwin shortly after his death.^[8] He described Greer's comments as "a poisonous discharge of bile".^[8] Portions of Birmingham's article were later quoted in the Parliament of New South Wales.^[9]

In 2015, Birmingham parted ways with the traditional tradebook publishing business by becoming his own publisher after his Australian publisher's decision to release his Dave Hooper series several months prior to the release of the same books in the much larger North American and European markets instead of the near simultaneous global release that was used for the release his previous works. The result of his Australian publisher's poor business decision resulted in dismal sales in those larger book markets caused by the demand being filled through pirated electronic editions due to lack of availability through normal channels such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Using the new publishing model, Birmingham has published three Stalin's Hammer novellas plus a new novel called A Girl In Time.^[10]

Axis of Time

In 2004 he published the alternative history Weapons of Choice, the first in the Axis of Time trilogy, a series of Tom Clancy-like techno-thrillers. Many writers from those genres appear as minor characters. It was published by Del Rey Books in the United States, and by Pan Macmillan in Australia.

The series tells of a multinational peacekeeping force from the early 21st century being taken back in time to 1942, where its presence completely changes the course of the Second World War. In August 2005, the second book, Designated Targets was published in Australia. Publication in the United States followed in October 2005.

The third and final full-length novel in the trilogy, Final Impact, was released in Australia in early August 2006, and was released in the United States in January 2007. The ABC reported in 2006 that there were two new Birmoverse books in the works, one set shortly after the end of the war, and another in the alternative 1980s, said to feature a dashing young RAF pilot: Richard Branson.^[11] One of these books was originally set to be released in Australia in 2008, but Birmingham instead wrote Without Warning. The 2013 novella Stalin's Hammer: Rome continues the series.

Disappearance series

The third book in the series, Angels of Vengeance, was released on 1 November 2011 in Australia and was released in April 2012 in the United States.

Works

Non-fiction

• He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (1994), {{ISBN|1-875989-21-8}}
• The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco (1998), {{ISBN|1-875989-29-3}}
• Leviathan: The Un-authorised Biography of Sydney (1999), {{ISBN|978-0091832612}}
• How to be a Man (co-authored with Dirk Flinthart) (2000), {{ISBN|978-1875989027}}
• Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's complicity in the East Timor Tragedy (2001), {{ISBN|978-1863953863}}
• Off One's Tits (collection of articles & essays) (2002), {{ISBN|978-1740511285}}
• Dopeland: Taking the High Road through Australia's Marijuana Culture (2003), {{ISBN|978-1740510301}}
• A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power (2005), {{ISBN|978-1863951340}}
• How to be a Writer: who smashes deadlines, crushes editors and lives in a solid gold hovercraft (2016), {{ISBN|978-1742234847}}
• Stranger Thingies: From Felafel to Now (2018), {{ISBN|978-1742235592}}
• On Father (2019), {{ISBN|978-0522873429}}

Fiction

Axis of Time Series

• Weapons of Choice (2004), {{ISBN|0-7329-1199-0}}
• Designated Targets (2005), {{ISBN|0-345-45714-5}}
• Final Impact (2006), {{ISBN|0-345-45716-1}}
• Stalin's Hammer: Rome (2012), novella, {{ISBN|978-1743341391}}
• Stalin's Hammer: Cairo (2016), ebook only novella
• Stalin's Hammer: Paris (2016), ebook only novella
• Stalin's Hammer: The Complete Sequence (2017), {{ISBN|978-0648003625}}, all three novellas (Rome, Cairo and Paris) have been repackaged as a single volume

The Disappearance Series

• Without Warning (2008), {{ISBN|978-0345502896}}
• After America (2010), {{ISBN|978-1405039413}}
• Angels of Vengeance (2011), {{ISBN|978-0345502933}}

The David Hooper Trilogy (also known as Dave Vs. The Monsters)

• Emergence (2015), {{ISBN|978-0345539878}}
• Resistance (2015), {{ISBN|978-0345539892}}
• Ascendance (2015), {{ISBN|978-0345539915}}^[14]
• The Protocol for Monsters (2016), ebook only novella
• Soul Full of Guns (2016), ebook only novella
• The Demons of Butte Crack County (2017) (Anthology)

A Girl In Time Series

• A Girl In Time (2016), {{ISBN|978-0648003601}}

Short stories

• Fortune and Glory (2015), short story that was published in The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth, {{ISBN|978-0451467577}}, an anthology in S.M. Stirling's Emberverse series

See also

• The Final Countdown (film)
• Worldwar

References

External links

• {{official website|http://www.cheeseburgergothic.com/}}
• John Birmingham's Brisbane Times blog, Blunt Instrument
• John Birmingham's other Brisbane Times blog, The Geek
• {{isfdb name}}
• John Birmingham's work at the Sydney Morning Herald
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20041012003231/http://www.abc.net.au/queensland/stories/s1147826.htm ABC Queensland story on Birmingham]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20041029201000/http://www.abc.net.au/arts/headspace/rn/booksw/leviathan/default.htm ABC Radio National story on Leviathan]
• Tracee Hutchison's response to Birmingham's Greer article in The Age
• Clive Hamilton's response in the Sydney Morning Herald
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20070429111730/http://www.abc.net.au/news/arts/articulate/200608/s1723613.htm Articulate story on the Axis of Time trilogy]
• Talk at the Wheeler Centre on female action heroines

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