Peter Temple

Peter Temple
Peter Temple at Oslo bokfestival in 2011
Born	1946 South Africa
Occupation	Writer
Genre	Murder mystery, thriller, crime fiction
Notable works	Jack Irish series
Spouse	Anita
Children	Nicholas

Peter Temple (born 1946 in South Africa) is an award-winning Australian crime fiction writer.

Peter Temple was an international magazine and newspaper journalist and editor. He moved to Sydney, Australia in 1980 and in 1982 moved to Melbourne to become the founding editor of Australian Society magazine. He has also taught journalism, editing and media studies at university. He played a significant role in establishing the professional editing course at RMIT, Melbourne.

Temple turned to fiction writing in the 1990s. His Jack Irish novels (Bad Debts, Black Tide, Dead Point, and White Dog) are set in Melbourne, and feature an unusual lawyer-gambler protagonist. In 2012, the Australian ABC Television and the German ZDF produced the first two as feature-length films with Guy Pearce in the title role under the series title Jack Irish. Temple has also written three stand-alone novels: An Iron Rose, Shooting Star, In the Evil Day (Identity Theory in the US), as well as The Broken Shore and its semi-sequel, Truth. In 2015 he published "Ithaca in My Mind" in the Allen and Unwin Shorts series. His novels have been published in 20 countries.

In 2010, Peter Temple won the Miles Franklin Award for his novel Truth. He has also won five Ned Kelly Awards for crime fiction, the most recent in 2006 for The Broken Shore, which also won the Colin Roderick Award for best Australian book and the Australian Book Publishers' Award for best general fiction. The Broken Shore also won the Crime Writers' Association Duncan Lawrie Dagger (Gold Dagger) in 2007. Temple is the first Australian to win a Gold Dagger.

ABC Television broadcast an adapted telemovie of The Broken Shore on the 2 February 2014.

Temple is married to Anita and has an adult son, Nicholas. He now lives in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.