Richard Fidler is a writer and broadcaster. For more than a decade now he's presented his national radio show Conversations with Richard Fidler, an in-depth, hour-long interview program on ABC Radio. The Conversations podcast is the most popular in Australia, with close to four million program downloads a month.

Although Richard majored in history and politics at university, it was only while touring the world in the back of a tour van with Paul McDermott and Tim Ferguson (members of the confrontational music/comedy trio The Doug Anthony Allstars) that he began to read history closely. In 1989-90 he was present in Berlin and Prague for the fall of communism, and was swept up in the revolutionary energy of the times.

After DAAS broke up in 1994, Richard went on to present several television programs for ABC TV, including Race Around the World and Aftershock, a series on radical emerging technologies.

Richard began on Conversations in 2005, collaborating with senior producer Pam O'Brien. Conversations was soon taken up by ABC Radio stations across Australia and across two networks, and has since become a national institution, generating 1.9 million program downloads every month.

 In 2011, a Churchill Fellowship brought Richard to the US and the UK to meet up with the people behind some outstanding public radio shows, including This American Life with Ira Glass, and Jay Allison, creator of The Moth Radio Hour.

 In 2015, Richard joined his friend Kári Gíslason, author of The Promise of Iceland, on a road trip across Iceland. For a month they travelled into fields, streams and fjords to record stories from the sagas, the classic medieval tales of the first Viking families to settle on that remote and ruggedly beautiful island. The second part of their mission was to resolve a family mystery relating to Kári's Icelandic family, that might possibly connect him to the greatest of the saga authors. This was broadcast as the acclaimed ABC Radio National series Saga Land.

 Richard's first non-fiction book Ghost Empire was released in July 2016. Ghost Empire blends travel memoir with history, following his journey into Istanbul with his fourteen-year-old son Joe, to uncover the history of Constantinople, the lost capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Ghost Empire became a best-seller and has been published in the U.S., China and Europe.

 In December 2016, Richard and Kári returned to Iceland for the arctic winter to write, research and embark on further adventures. The result is a handsome book, Saga Land, published by HarperCollins in October 2017.

 Richard lives in Sydney, Australia with his family.

Head to Richard’s website to find out more: http://www.richard-fidler.com