About the Author

Jennifer Cockburn, a career international lawyer, retired in 2008 with the idea of writing a biography of her father, the late Australian journalist and author Stewart Cockburn. The result, WRITING FOR HIS LIFE: Stewart Cockburn, Crusading Journalist, will be published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in May 2022.

Ms Cockburn was born in Canberra, Australia, and grew up in Adelaide and Canberra, with a two-year period in Washington, DC in the early 1960s when her father was Press Attaché at the Australian Embassy there. She graduated from the Australian National University with a BA in Political Science and an LLB (Hons) degree, and later earned her Master of Laws at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Prior to settling in the Washington area, she spent two years in Philadelphia, where she worked for a civil rights lawyer on police brutality and employment discrimination cases against the City of Philadelphia.  In Washington she pursued a nearly thirty-year legal career, first in private practice and then at the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group.  Her IFC legal work on financings of private sector projects in developing countries took her to India, China and Turkey, among other places. She also lived in Lisbon, Portugal in the mid-1990s.

Ms Cockburn is a member of Biographers International Organization (BIO), for which she was a member of its Hazel Rowley Prize selection committee for several years. Her interests beyond biography include music, hiking, tennis and gardening. She is a dual citizen of Australia and the United States, and lives with her husband Bernardo Frydman in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She has one daughter and two step-daughters.