Bitter bread

by Ronald McKie

264 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1978

About the author

Ronald Cecil Hamlyn McKie was a fifth generation Austrlian. He was educated at the Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland, and then worked as a journalist on newspapers in Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore and China. In WW2 he served in the AIF and as a war correspondent with the British in Burma, and with British/US armies in Italy, reporting on the Potsdam Conference in Berlin and the trial of Vidkum Quisling in Norway at the end of the war. In 1952 he was the first Australian journalist to receive a Smith-Mundt Fellowship from the US State Department and spent six months in the US.
His first novel The Mango Tree won the Miles Franklin award in 1974. His other books include best-welling war documentaries Proud Echo and The Heroes, and his political and social books include This was Singapore, Malaysia in Focus, The Company of Animals Bali, and Singapore.