tony maniaty
As an author, journalist, photographer, screenwriter and academic, working across a broad creative canvas, I’ve been helped by great mentors, and I've used that experience to help others with their creativity. Albert Camus said, 'We are all special cases', and that's my outlook: we're all equal, but unique in our ways. Like most writers I'm intrigued by human behavior. The great Hollywood film director Billy Wilder noted his classic movie scripts ('Ace in the Hole', 'Double Indemnity', 'Sunset Boulevard') were based on a profoundly simple question: 'What makes people do the things they do?'
We spend our lives trying to figure that out.
After living and working in Australia, Britain, France, the United States, Greece and Denmark, and traveling through more than thirty countries, my outlook is global. These days I move between Paris and Sydney. My father was a Greek from Asia Minor and an early immigrant to Australia, my mother's ancestry was Anglo-Saxon, and my sons have Latvian and Irish blood as well.
Cultural diversity - sharing ideas, knowledge and experiences with others - is what makes life worth living.
To date I've published five books. (Seeing my first novel with the Penguin logo was special.) The main themes of my work arise largely from personal experiences, my interactions with society, as well as my time as a correspondent: exploring the impacts of war, upheaval, and migration. I'm currently working on a novel about refugees and cultural displacement, and recently published a photo-book documenting the impact on Covid-19 on life in Paris. My blog covers a range of interests: cinema, journalism, history and biography, architecture and design, travel, music and - naturally - photography and literature, in all their wonderful forms.
Awards I've received include Australia Council for the Arts Fellowships, the National Short Story of the Year Award, and the New South Wales Premier's Writers Award. The best thing about awards, apart from any monies involved, is the publicity they generate for literature and the arts. (And right now, the world badly needs creative inputs.) In recent years I've also managed to complete a PhD. My thesis on the lives and psychology of war correspondents was awarded the Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor's Commendation for Excellence.