Professor Peter Greste is an academic, film maker, journalist, and author. He is currently professor of journalism at Macquarie University.

He came to academia in 2018 after a 30-year career as an award-winning foreign correspondent for the BBC, Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera, in some of the world’s most volatile places. He was based in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Latin America and Africa, and covered conflicts across those regions and in the Middle East. In 2011, he won a Peabody Award for a documentary on Somalia, Land of Anarchy, for the BBC’s flagship current affairs program, Panorama.

He is best known for becoming a headline himself, when he and two of his colleagues were arrested in Cairo while working for Al Jazeera, and charged with terrorism offences. In letters smuggled from prison, Peter described their incarceration as an attack on press freedom.

His campaign for freedom earned him numerous awards including from the British Royal Television Society, the Walkley Foundation, the RSL, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the International Association of Press Clubs. In 2017, with two colleagues, he established the advocacy group, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom which actively campaigns for media freedom across Australia and the Asia Pacific region.

As an academic, he leads a research program investigating the impact of national security legislation on public interest journalism. Peter is the author of The First Casualty about his experiences in Egypt, and the wider war on journalism.