Biography
Paul Ham is a historian specialising in war, conflict and politics. Born and raised in Sydney, Paul has spent his working life in London, Sydney and Paris. His books have been published to critical acclaim in Australia, Britain, the United States and many other countries, and have won several literary awards. A former correspondent for The Sunday Times, Paul has a Masters degree in Economic History from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He lives in Paris, with frequent trips to Sydney and London, and takes time off now and then to produce the Big Fat Poetry Pig-Out, an annual poetry recital, for charity.
New Jerusalem
One more book coming soon
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Young Hitler:
The Making of the Führer
Penguin Random House (UK and Australia/NZ); Pegasus (USA); Objetiva (Brazil); Dioptra (Greece); Zeplin (Turkey); Omega (Czech Republic) 2017-2018
By peeling back the layers of Hitler's childhood, his war record and his early political career, Paul Ham's Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer seeks the man behind the myth. How did the defining years of Hitler’s life, especially his experience of the Great War, influence his rise to power?
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Young Hitler:
The Making of the
Führer
Penguin Random House (UK and Australia/NZ); Pegasus (USA); Objetiva (Brazil); Dioptra (Greece); Zeplin (Turkey); Omega (Czech Republic) 2017-2018
Passchendaele:
Requiem for Doomed Youth
Penguin Random House (UK and Australia/NZ) 2017
Winner of the 2018 Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
Passchendaele: Requiem For Doomed Youth shows how ordinary men experienced one of the worst battles on the Western Front, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, wiped out. The soldiers on both sides were the pawns in a political and military power struggle that determined their fate and has foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century.
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1914:
The Year the World Ended
Penguin Random House (UK and Australia/NZ) 2013
Winner of the 2015 Queensland Literary Prize for Non-Fiction
In August 1914 the largest armies thew world had seen met on a vast battlefield. Within a few months they would fight themselves to a standstill, plunging the world in a war that will kill or wound 37m people, tear down the fabric of society, uproot sclerotic empires and set the world on course for the bloodiest century in human history.
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1913:
The Eve of War
Kindle Single, Amazon 2014
In this controversial and concise essay, Paul Ham argues that the First World War was not a historical mistake, a conflict into which the Great Powers stumbled by accident. Nor was it a justified war, in which German aggression had to be defeated. The politicians and generals of the day willed the war, and prepared in detail for it – but eventually found themselves caught up in an inferno they could no longer control.
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The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and their Aftermath
HarperCollins 2010, Picador 2015
Shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for History
Hiroshima Nagasaki presents the grisly, unadorned truth about the bombings, blurred for so long by postwar propaganda and wilful ignorance, and transforms our understanding of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.
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Sandakan:
The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches
Penguin Random House (UK and Australia/NZ) 2012
Shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for History
This is the story of what happened to 2,500 prisoners of war sent to the worst POW camp in the Pacific, in British North Borneo. Of the 1,000 who were forced marched into the heart of the island, just six survived.
Vietnam:
The Australian War
HarperCollins 2008
Winner of the NSW Premier's Prize for History
Paul Ham’s Vietnam: The Australia War, now a feature-length documentary, has provoked great controversy – and praise – for its devastating account of Australia’s 15 year involvement in the war in Indochina.
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Kokoda
HarperCollins 2004
For the first time, the compelling story of the infamous Kokoda Track campaign - the first major land defeat of the Japanese - has been told from both sides of the conflict.
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