Richard Fidler writer & broadcaster
Richard Fidler is the author of several best-selling books that blend history with travel writing and mythology. His books include Ghost Empire, his history of Constantinople, and The Golden Maze: a Biography of Prague. Richard also co-wrote Saga Land with his friend Kári Gíslason, the story of their journey into the sagas of Iceland. His most recent history is The Book of Roads & Kingdoms.
Throughout the week, Richard presents Conversations on ABC Radio. Millions of episodes of the Conversations podcast are downloaded every month.
In 2026, Richard and Kári Gíslason launched a new history podcast series Viking Lives, exploring the great arc of Viking history through a chain of their life stories.
He lives with his family in Sydney, Australia.
THE BOOK OF
ROADS & KINGDOMS
Winner of the 2023 Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction
A lost imperial city, full of wonder and marvels. An empire that was the largest the world had ever seen, established with astonishing speed. A people obsessed with travel, knowledge and adventure.
THE BOOK OF ROADS AND KINGDOMS is the story of the wanderers who travelled out to the edges of the known world during Islam’s fabled Golden Age; an era when the caliphs of Baghdad presided over a dominion greater than the Roman Empire at its peak, stretching from Tunisia to India. Their sudden emergence as a world power constitutes one of the most dramatic upheavals in global history.
Imperial Baghdad, founded on the Tigris River as the ‘City of Peace’, quickly became the biggest and richest metropolis on the planet. Standing atop one of the city’s four gates, its founding caliph proclaimed: Here is the Tigris, and nothing stands between it and China.
In a flourishing culture of science, literature and philosophy, the book-obsessed, travel-mad people of Baghdad were fascinated by the world and everything in it. Inspired by their Prophet’s commandment to seek knowledge all over the world, these traders, diplomats, soldiers and scientists left behind the pleasures of cosmopolitan Baghdad to venture by camel, horse, and ship into the unknown.
Those who returned wrote accounts of their adventures, both realistic and fantastical. They left reports of the Great Wall of China, the cities of East Africa, the glittering palace of the Caesars in Constantinople, and of a Viking human sacrifice in the riverlands of modern-day Russia.
“Richard Fidler’s bewitching book will change how you see the world … Just as The Thousand and One Nights transformed the imperial metropolis into ‘an immortal city of the imagination’, so too does Richard Fidler spin a bewitching tale consisting of stories within stories that radically tilts the Western reader’s perspective, revealing a world when all roads led to Baghdad.”
“Like a Genie it opens a wondrous world of Islam’s Golden Age ... Fidler’s skill is in enlivening this period and immersing readers as informed observers experiencing events.”
G H O S T E M P I R E
Constantinople: the City of the World’s Desire
“…thanks to the stylish cleverness of an exceptionally curious and talented man, we can feast on what strange magic the city brought – and still brings today – to the world beyond. I am speechless with admiration.”
In 2014, Richard Fidler and his son Joe made a journey to Istanbul. Fired by Richard’s passion for the rich history of the dazzling Byzantine Empire – centred around the legendary Constantinople – we are swept into some of the most extraordinary tales in history. The clash of civilisations, the fall of empires, the rise of Christianity, revenge, lust, murder. Turbulent stories from the past are brought vividly to life at the same time as a father navigates the unfolding changes in his relationship with his son.
GHOST EMPIRE is a revelation: a beautifully written ode to a lost civilisation, and a warmly observed father-son adventure far from home.
“Fidler displays great charm in the telling of his tale, spicing it with delicious gossip.”
“Fidler’s story leaves its readers with a sense of faith in the renewing, illumination, social powers of historical narrative.”
“Fidler’s understanding of the Byzantine contribution to our civilisation is unimpeachable.”
THE GOLDEN MAZE
A Biography of Prague
IN 1989, RICHARD FIDLER was living in London when revolution broke out across Europe. Excited by this galvanising historic, human, moment, he travelled to Prague, where a decrepit police state was being overthrown by crowds of ecstatic citizens. His experience of the Velvet Revolution never let go of him.
Thirty years later Fidler returns to Prague to uncover the glorious and grotesque history of Europe's most instagrammed and uncanny city: a jumble of gothic towers, baroque palaces and zig-zag lanes that has survived plagues, pogroms, Nazi terror and Soviet tanks. Founded in the ninth Century, Prague gave the world the golem, the robot, and the world's biggest statue of Stalin, a behemoth that killed almost everyone who touched it.
Fidler tells the story of the reclusive emperor who brought the world's most brilliant minds to Prague Castle to uncover the occult secrets of the universe. He explores the Black Palace, the wartime headquarters of the Nazi SS, and he meets victims of the communist secret police. Reaching back into Prague's mythic past, he finds the city's founder, the pagan priestess Libussa who prophesised: I see a city whose glory will touch the stars.
The author in Prague during the Velvet Revolution.
Photo by Josephyne Oliveri
“Fidler’s passion and love for the ancient city infuses every word, pours off every page, and if you’ve never been interested in Prague, it will find a way into your heart after reading this book … The times, the places and the people are vibrant, arresting and breathing. The Golden Maze gives us a brilliant living history of Prague, told through stories alive with hundreds of voices chiming in. This is the magic and power of this work.”
“Fidler’s narrative is compelling. He writes in short sections, arching across time, and comparing and contrasting the politics, religion and art of different eras. The entire journey is propelled by the same combination of wide-ranging general knowledge, intellectual rigour and the ease of expression of an experienced journalist.”
SAGA LAND
The Island of Stories at the Edge of the World
Broadcaster Richard Fidler and author Kári Gíslason are good friends. They share a deep attachment to the sagas of Iceland - the true stories of the first Viking families who settled on that remote island in the Middle Ages. These are tales of blood feuds, of dangerous women, and people who are compelled to kill the ones they love the most. The sagas are among the greatest stories ever written, but the identity of their authors is largely unknown.
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Together, Richard and Kári travel across Iceland, to the places where the sagas unfolded a thousand years ago. They cross fields, streams and fjords to immerse themselves in the folklore of this fiercely beautiful island. And there is another mission: to resolve a longstanding family mystery - a gift from Kari's Icelandic father that might connect him to the greatest of the saga authors.
Richard & Kári at the medieval Viking parliament at Thingvellir, Iceland.
“A fascinating insight into Iceland’s little-known history and literature, and a compelling story of one man’s quest to reclaim his identity.”
“I adored this book. A wondrous compendium of Iceland’s best sagas.”
“Part history, part journalistic account, this is a lively investigation of the Icelandic Sagas ... a compelling overview of a land and its people.”
“Digressive and compendious, it is a book that resists narrow classification ... Fidler and Gislason immerse themselves in every experience and encounter, and the reader along with them.”
