Phil Leask was born in Australia in 1947. He was brought up in Queensland and later moved to Tasmania. He is based in London but maintains close contact with Australia where he has family, friends and professional connections.

As happened to many Australian expatriate writers and artists of his generation, his initial education in Australia gave him a strong sense of the fascination of Europe, its cities, history and culture.  At the same time, Australia provided a deep connection to a specific landscape - in a wide sense - and a very different history and culture, derived in part from Europe and more recently Asia, but also from the history and culture of its indigenous people and from the conflict between peoples and cultures that is at the heart of Australia's history.

These wide- ranging interests and the tensions between them, along with a broad range of experience - for instance, in planning and rebuilding cities and the communities within them - and further formal studies in European history, literature, philosophy and languages have contributed strongly to Phil Leask's writing, giving it a distinctive, highly-original style and content, with memorable characters and a profound sense of place.

The following pages give more details of Phil Leask's life and writing, with details of his novels and short stories and responses to them.

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'Ancient History' is a short story about a psychotherapist and a woman who was in Hamburg at the time of the bombing and firestorm in 1943. It is included in a collection published by Karnac (London), entitled Tales of Psychotherapy (ed. Jane Ryan), which was launched at the Freud Museum in London in July 2007.