Michael Duffy (Australian journalist)

Michael Duffy is an Australian writer and former editor and publisher. He edited The Independent Monthly, a general magazine owned by Max Suich and John B Fairfax, from 1993 to 1996. Then he and his wife Alex Snellgrove set up a publishing company, Duffy & Snellgrove, that published the first books by Peter Robb, John Birmingham and Rosalie Ham. Other authors included Les Murray, Mungo MacCallum and John Olsen.[1] The company stopped publishing new titles in 2005.

Duffy presented ABC Radio National's Counterpoint with Paul Comrie-Thomson and wrote for News Limited publications and then the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun Herald until June 2012.[2]

He has written the true crime books Call Me Cruel and Bad, but is best known for the novels The Tower, The Simple Death and Drive By.[3] The latter was described in the Adelaide Review as: "a brilliant mix of reportage drawn from life observation and the novelist’s dramatic touch, to paint a portrait of crime and its effects – grief, confusion, loss, multiple levels of complicity – amongst Sydney’s contemporary Lebanese community."[4]