Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of  many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne.

She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.

Her most recent work is a Quarterly Essay “Cry Me A River – the Tragedy of the Murray Darling Basin” which was published in March 2020.

Penny Wong: Passion and Principle is her most recent book. This is the first biography of the Australian politician, and was released in October 2019. It has been longlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Simons co-wrote the biography of former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser.  Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs won both the Book of the Year and the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2011.

She also wrote an unauthorised biography of mass media proprietor Kerry Stokes (chairman of the Seven Network). Kerry Stokes: Self-Made Man was published by Penguin in 2013 and was nominated for best non-fiction book at the 2014 Walkley Awards, and won the history prize in the WA Premier’s Literary Awards.

Simons is also a novelist and a gardening writer. Her book Six Square Metres was launched in October 2015, and a USA edition was published in early 2020.  Her book Resurrection in a Bucket – The Rich and Fertile Story of Compost was published by Allen & Unwin in May 2004. For many years Simons wrote the popular Earthmother gardening column for The Australian, and today she writes a quarterly gardening column for The Saturday Paper. 

As well as writing books Simons is a freelance investigative journalist. Her long-form journalism has been published in The Monthly, Inside Story, The Age and other publications.

Simons was a founding board member (2018-2021) of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, which conducts research and advocacy on media issues, as well as its Chair of Research. She remains a member of the Expert Research Panel. She is also the Chair of Angeles Relief Inc a charity established to help the children she wrote about in her Philippines journalism.

Simons holds a Doctorate in Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney.