Peter Robb (author)

---

title: "Peter Robb (author)" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["australian-crime-writers", "australian-non-fiction-writers", "living-people", "the-monthly-people", "1946-births", "writers-from-melbourne", "australian-male-novelists", "australian-male-non-fiction-writers", "people-from-toorak,-victoria", "australian-expatriates-in-italy"] description: "Australian author (born 1946)" topic_path: "geography/australia" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Robb_(author)" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Australian author (born 1946) ::

Peter Robb (born 1946) is an Australian author, who has also written under the pen names B. Selkie and Ross Edwards.

Early life and education

Robb was born 1946 in Toorak, Melbourne. He spent his early years in Australia and was educated in New Zealand.

He was involved in a small Trotskyist organisation named the Communist League, which was sympathetic to the Fourth International, between 1972 and 1978, although Robb did not join the organisation until 1975.. and activist and later academic Marcia Langton was the third member of the CL committee. McCarthy broke away from the SWP (then Socialist Workers League) to create CL, and then, along with Robb and Langton, rejoined the SWP four years later, in November 1976.

Career

Robb left Australia for Europe in 1971, working there for several years before returning to Australia. He moved to Italy in 1978 and spent 15 years there, living much of the time in Naples

His second book, M, a biography of the Italian artist Caravaggio, was published in Australia in 1998, and went on to provoke controversy when it was published in Britain two years later.

In December 1999, he published Pig's Blood and Other Fluids, a collection of three crime fiction novellas.

In October 2003, Robb published his fourth book, A Death in Brazil.

In October 2010, his book Street Fight in Naples was published by Allen & Unwin.

Some of his works were written under the pen names B. Selkie and Ross Edwards.

Plagiarism allegations

In 2004, former Veja editor Mario Sergio Conti accused Robb of appropriating material from Conti's Brazil-published book Noticias do Planalto (News from the Presidential Palace) for A Death in Brazil. Conti branded Robb "a rude thief, a colonial predator, a privateer sure of his own impunity" who "just copied [my book] because it is written in a language that no one in the rich countries understands." Robb denied he had plagiarised from Conti and responded: "It is normal practice for historians and journalists to draw on previous published sources for their own work, and correct practice to acknowledge and cite them. I do both. Facts are public property."

Academia

Robb has taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oulu in Finland, and the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples.

Recognition and awards

• 1997: Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction (the non-fiction prize of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award), for Midnight in Sicily
• 2004: A Death in Brazil is announced as ''The Age'''s non-fiction book of the year
• 2012: Appointed the first CAL Non-Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Selected works

Books

• Midnight in Sicily (1996)
• M (1998)
• Pig's Blood and Other Fluids (1999)
• A Death in Brazil (2003)
• Street Fight in Naples (2010)
• Lives (2012)

Essays

References

References

1. (14 February 2012). "Peter Robb".
2. (8 November 2008). "Vale John McCarthy, 1948".
3. (16 December 1976). "More Communist League members join SWP". [[Direct Action]].
4. (December 1976). "Whither the Communist League?". Australasian Spartacist.
5. Robb, P.. (1999). "Midnight in Sicily". Vintage Books.
6. "Midnight in Sicily".
7. (24 August 2004). "Gained in translation". The Guardian.
8. (3 July 2004). "Plagiarism claim adds an extra ingredient to novel of intrigue". The Sydney Morning Herald.
9. (26 January 2001). "Peter Robb".
10. (October 2023)
11. Online version is titled "Art Gallery NSW's [[Michael Brand (art historian). Michael Brand]]".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::