Tony Wright

Tony Wright joined the Age in May 2007 as national affairs editor, based in Canberra. This is his second stint with the Age, having worked from 1998 to 2000 as chief political correspondent and Canberra bureau chief. For the intervening seven years, he was national affairs editor at The Bulletin.

Tony's journalism career spans 37 years at a wide range of rural, regional and metropolitan newspapers. Raised a farm boy, he began as a cadet at The Portland Observer in western Victoria in 1970. After bouncing around a range of papers, he worked for more than a decade at The Border Morning Mail in Albury-Wodonga, where he became deputy editor. Tony moved to Canberra in 1987 as a senior reporter and feature writer at The Canberra Times, and from 1989 to 1992 was their chief political correspondent. Tony joined the Sydney Morning Herald in 1992 as foreign affairs and defence correspondent, and later became political correspondent.

Tony has written several plays and two books - Turn Right at Istanbul (2004), about travelling around Turkey with his great-uncle's war diary, and Bad Ground (2006), the story of Brant Webb and Todd Russell's entrapment and rescue at the Beaconsfield gold mine. Tony has won three UN Media Peace Prizes, has been a Walkley Award finalist five times (and was awarded a special commendation in 1994 for his reporting on the Rwanda genocide). Tony also has regular radio spots in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney with ABC radio.