The Correspondent, Peter Greste, Australia, 2017/2025

In 2017, Peter Greste published The First Casualty; in 2025, with the successful launch of the film The Correspondent, based on The First Casualty, he republished his book (with many updates) as The Correspondent.

A dual-nationality holder – Australian and Latvian – Greste, a journalist and foreign correspondent since the early 1990s, has worked in some of the most dangerous places on Earth. In 2011 he left the BBC where he had been working for many years and became a correspondent for Al Jazeera English in Africa. In December 2013 he was sent to Cairo to report on the unrest that had followed an unexpected change of government. He was simply filling in for another journalist and expected to be back in Africa shortly after Christmas.

This did not happen. Greste, together with his two Al Jazeera colleagues, was arrested and accused of associating with the Muslim Brotherhood (a terrorist association, according to the Egyptian government) and was thrown into a series of mediaeval prisons. When the trial finally eventuated Greste expected that he and his two companions would be released with an apology, but by this time the truth had been well and truly buried, and all three were sentenced to several years in prison. That Greste was finally released after more than a year was thanks to his own persistence and the persistence of the many people who were helping him.

The story of Greste’s arrest and imprisonment is the central story in The Correspondent (and the resulting film), but it is Greste’s descriptions of his work in places like Africa and Afghanistan that place the book on a completely different level. It is in these many pages of description and analysis that the reader becomes frighteningly aware of the important part played by journalists and the reason so many are presently being imprisoned (or killed). There are too many governments that do not want the truth to be told.

A book that can definitely be read, and pondered over, more than once.