Piers Akerman

Piers Akerman (born 12 June 1950) is an Australian journalist, conservative commentator and columnist for the Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

Brief biography

Piers Akerman was born in Wewak, Papua New Guinea, the third son in a family of four children of John, an Australian Government doctor, and Eve Akerman (d. 2003), a newspaper columnist and reviewer. The family left PNG for India in 1951, before returning to Perth, Western Australia, where Piers was raised.

He attended Guildford Grammar School, where he remained until his expulsion, when he was "asked to leave" following a dispute with the headmaster. He spent the last few months of his schooling at Christ Church Grammar School but did not complete his final exams.

In the United States, while covering the 1974 America's Cup at Newport, Rhode Island, Akerman met his wife, Suzanne, a solicitor. They were married in Connecticut several years later and have two children, Tess and Pia. They now live in Sydney.

Career

Akerman began his media career at Western Australia's only daily, The West Australian. He then moved on to the short-lived Victorian newspaper Newsday and took his first News Limited job at the Daily Mirror in Sydney. He was briefly at The Australian as Foreign Editor in 1983.