Konrad Marshall is a journalist, lecturer, would-be carpenter, husband, father, long suffering insufferable Richmond Football Club fan, slow smoked barbecue enthusiast, small batch bourbon sipper and sometimes-but-not-often-enough long distance runner. He has worked in public relations but also suburban fence building, and now plies his trade as a senior writer with Good Weekend magazine. Before that, his work appeared in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The (Melbourne) Magazine, The Indianapolis Star, The Florida Times-Union and The Post-Star.
Konrad is also the author of “Yellow & Black: A Season with Richmond” (Slattery Media), a book that tracks the remarkable rise of the Richmond Football Club in 2017, as they recovered from a 13th place finish to win the most unlikely of premierships, breaking a 37-year drought. Marshall subsequently published “Stronger & Bolder: Inside the 2019 AFL Finals Series with Richmond” and then “The Hard Way: The Story of Richmond’s 13th Premiership” through Hardie Grant.
“Konrad Marshall is a writer of uncommon sensitivity, a master of observing the beauty and strangeness in everyday life”, or so says his former editor, Amelia Lester, but Amelia is far too generous. Konrad simply tries to tell tales about interesting or quirky events and people, in ways that might reveal something about the human condition.
He writes feature stories about masculinity in sport and the perils of extreme endurance exercise, about his wife and his son, his dad and his aunty, about spring racing carnival excess and the safety of women on our streets at night, about concussion class actions and flesh eating ulcers.
In service to the story, Konrad has performed live as a drag queen (Miss Indy Starlet), paddled the length of the Yarra River in winter, trained and worked as a registered taxi driver, and briefly reinvented himself as perhaps the worst ever tabloid sex columnist.
He has been lucky enough to interview global sporting icon Rod Laver, Australian television identity Andrew Denton, tennis champion Ash Barty, international cricketer Ellyse Perry, basketball star Andrew Bogut, terror lawyer Rob Stary, and Indianapolis 500 winner Will Power.
He very much enjoys American magazine writing, by everyone from Norman Mailer to Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe to Tom Junod, Gary Smith to David Grann, William Langewiesche to Nick Paumgarten – each of whom writes about the strange and the beautiful.
Konrad is very, very bad at telling stories in person, which is why he writes. His stories often take quite a while to read, but are hopefully worth it. He is fairly certain that using the third-person here hasn’t fooled you into thinking someone else wrote this blurb on his behalf.