Peter Robb (author)

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.

As a young man he was involved in a small Trotskyist organisation named the Communist League, which was sympathetic to the Fourth International, between 1972 and 1976. Robb helped produced its newspaper, Militant, and was also key in the departure of a section of the Communist League's leadership, through absorption by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1976. The group was co-founded by Queensland doctor John McCarthy (1948–2008), who played a major role in integrating the CL and the SWP, 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 and southern Italy, interspersed with sojourns to Brazil. At the end of 1992 he returned to Sydney. His experiences in southern Italy were recounted in his first book, Midnight in Sicily (1996).

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.

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)