Jesse Fink has been called ‘detective like’ by America’s Library Journal magazine.
He is the author of seven non-fiction books and has been published in over 20 countries and 13 foreign languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Swedish, Japanese, Portuguese, Danish, Serbian, Russian, Estonian and Lithuanian. His three most recent books – THE EAGLE IN THE MIRROR, PURE NARCO and BON: THE LAST HIGHWAY – have also been released in audio editions in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.
Fink was born in London in 1973 and raised in Sydney, Australia. He attended Fort Street High School and graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Technology.
Fink worked for five years as senior editor of non-fiction at HarperCollins Publishers Australia, helming acclaimed and award-winning books such as David Day’s biographies of Australian prime ministers John Curtin (John Curtin: A Life) and Ben Chifley (Chifley), Jill Margo’s biography of Westfield billionaire Frank Lowy (Frank Lowy: Pushing the Limits), Christopher Kremmer’s The Carpet Wars and the late George Negus’s The World from Italy, among dozens of other titles.
Fink won several prestigious sportswriting awards as a print journalist for Inside Sport magazine, which he served as deputy editor from 2003 to 2006. In 2003 he was nominated for a Walkley Award for Coverage of Sport, Australia’s top journalism prize. and won an Australian Sports Commission award for feature writing.
In 2006, Fink began writing daily blogs for Fox Sports Australia. The following year he wrote his first book, 15 DAYS IN JUNE (Hardie Grant, 2007), the story of Australia’s performance at the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany and the Socceroos’ forgotten history in Asian football. The book was re-released in two digital editions and a print edition.
For the next five years, Fink’s sportswriting went on to appear on a number of football websites throughout Australia, India, South Korea, South-East Asia and Europe, including ESPN Star Sports and Fox Sports Asia. His column for SBS Television’s The World Game was the most read online football blog in Australia. His investigative work on corruption within FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation was a mainstay of his writing on football.
In 2011 Fink wrote a feature about his divorce from his first wife for Australian marie claire magazine. It ended up securing him a book deal with Hachette Australia, which published his memoir of divorce, dating and single parenting, LAID BARE, in 2012.
Men’s Health praised the book as ‘X-rated, honest and compelling’, while the Herald Sun described it as ‘Penthouse Letters with post-orgasmic guilt… an engrossing read’. Fink’s writing on sex and relationships went on to appear in several national magazines, notably News Limited’s Sunday Style. In 2017, an ‘author’s cut’ edition of LAID BARE was released by Xoum Publishing.
His next book, THE YOUNGS: THE BROTHERS WHO BUILT AC/DC, was published by Penguin Random House Australia in 2013 and by St Martin’s Press in the United States in 2014, as well as over a dozen European, South American and Asian countries: Russia (AST), Brazil (Editora Gutenberg), Germany (Hannibal Verlag), United Kingdom (Black & White Publishing), Lithuania (Versus Aureus), Serbia (Dereta), Argentina (Planeta), France (Camion Blanc), Czech Republic (Volvox Globator), India (HarperCollins), Japan (Disk Union), Italy (Giunti Editore), Spain (Planeta) and Denmark (People's Press).
A number-one bestselling music biography in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, THE YOUNGS: THE BROTHERS WHO BUILT AC/DC was chosen among PRI Public Radio International’s Best Books of 2014 and was the subject of a feature piece in The New Yorker. The book was also a number-one national bestseller for two consecutive months in Denmark, a first for any Australian author.
In 2017, Fink released the momentous BON: THE LAST HIGHWAY (Penguin Random House Australia, ECW Press, Black & White Publishing, Hannibal Verlag, Editora Saraiva, Disk Union, Le Castor Astral, Vaktel Forlag, Il Castello Editore, Rockmark), a 500-page biography of AC/DC singer Bon Scott. To date, it has been published in eight languages and 10 countries.
BON: THE LAST HIGHWAY was a number-one music biography in Sweden, the United Kingdom and France, chosen for five Book of the Year lists, and the cover story in the December 2017 issue of Classic Rock. It is now widely considered the definitive biography of the AC/DC legend. On the 50th anniversary of Scott joining AC/DC, Fink released a special addendum to the Scott biography, BON: NOTES FROM THE HIGHWAY, a collection of material not included in the original book.
In 2020, Fink’s fifth book, PURE NARCO (Penguin Random House Australia, John Blake Publishing, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, Äripäev), co-credited to Luis Navia, was released. It tells the life story of Cuban-American cocaine trafficker Luis Navia and Navia’s dramatic arrest in Venezuela by agents of the DEA and United States Customs Service.
Fink’s sixth book, THE EAGLE IN THE MIRROR, a biography of Australian-born British intelligence officer and accused Nazi and Soviet spy Charles Howard ‘Dick’ Ellis, was released by Penguin Random House Australia and Black & White Publishing (UK) in August 2023. Kensington Publishing released the book in the United States in May 2024.
An Italian edition of BON: THE LAST HIGHWAY was published in November 2025 by Il Castello Editore. A Croatian edition will be published in June 2026 by Rockmark.
He lives in England with his wife, Alexis, and has completed his seventh book, THE DRINKER'S GUIDE TO JAPAN, co-authored by Tokyo-based restaurateur and Japanese alcohol expert Wayne Shennen. It will be published by Penguin Random House UK in October 2026. Fink has an adult daughter.
