Kevin Rudd Lu Kewen

Since Kevin Rudd became Labor leader in December 2006, he has galvanised the Labor Party and appears on the brink of becoming leader of this country.

But who is Kevin Rudd? What is his experience, both political and personal? What sort of man is he? What role does his religion play in his life? How does his wife’s multimillion-dollar business influence him? In short, what sort of Prime Minister might he make?

In this first biography of Rudd, author, journalist and former Prime Ministerial press secretary Robert Macklin analyses the public and the private record, including Rudd’s time as a diplomat in China and his role in Wayne Goss’s Queensland Government .

Macklin has conducted extensive exclusive interviews with Rudd’s former employers and colleagues to reveal the man away from the spotlight. And he has had full access to the Rudd family, and to Rudd himself, who talks about the enduring legacy of his childhood, through the tragedy of his early teens to the moment when he decided ‘to get determined’.

This is a human story as much as a political one – sometimes funny, sometimes touching – written with great pace and drama. Above all, it is a timely book full of insights into the man who would be Prime Minister.

To be published in June 2007 by Penguin Group (Australia)