Michael Robotham is an Australian crime fiction writer who was born in Casino, NSW, and went to school in Gundagai and Coffs Harbour. In February 1979 he began a journalism cadetship on The Sun, an afternoon newspaper in Sydney owned by the Fairfax family. He started his journalism career in the same cadet intake as the award-winning novelist and reporter Geraldine Brooks, who worked for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1986, Michael went to London where he worked as a reporter and sub-editor for various UK national newspapers before becoming a staff feature writer on The Mail on Sunday in 1989. He rose to become deputy features editor before resigning in May 1993. He then went on to become a ghostwriter, collaborating on fifteen "autobiographies" for people in the arts, politics, the military and sport. Twelve of these titles became Sunday Times bestsellers. In 1996 he returned to Australia with his family and continued writing full-time. In 2002, a partial manuscript of his first novel THE SUSPECT, became the subject of a bidding war at the London Book Fair. It was later translated into 22 languages and sold over a million copies around the world.