About Phil

Dr Phil Kafcaloudes has worked as a journalist and presenter for many years on radio and TV.

For 9 years he was the voice of Australia on the ABC’s international arm, Radio Australia, hosting a current affairs/chat style show, interviewing the major minds of our time, along the big names in arts, including most of the Booker Prize winners of the last 20 years, James Bonds, dancers, Shakespeareans and musicians. Before that he was a political reporter for ABC TV News, and arts editor at ABC NewsRadio. In 2013 he was recognised with a Highly Commended in the International Radio Personality category of the Asian Broadcasting Union awards. This added to his shortlisting in the same category in the worldwide Association of International Broadcasting awards.

His solo show from Guangzhou in China in 2007 was the ABC’s first English broadcast from mainland China. He also presented shows from Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Samoa.

Phil was an originating presenter on the News Breakfast TV program on the national ABC News 24 television network, and has been a guest presenter on Insiders with Barrie Cassidy on Sunday mornings on ABC1. He has filled-in in for presenters Jon Faine and Lindy Burns on ABC 774 Melbourne and the drive show on ABC 702 in Sydney, and presents the occasional shift on ABC regional radio. He is a correspondent on Radio New Zealand and TV New Zealand, and has hosted their premier current affairs show, Morning Report.

Phil’s third book Someone Else’s War, a novel based on the life of his Greek spy grandmother, sold out its first edition in three months. The novel was launched in Sydney by former NSW premier Bob Carr [see photo above]. The Greek translation, Olga’s War, went into reprint in Europe in 3 weeks.

This history journey led to his PhD (awarded in 2020) on the validity of writing true stories in a fictional modality. His thesis can be downloaded here: https://opal.latrobe.edu.au/articles/thesis/Going_the_Way_of_the_Ancients/14121269

As part of the PhD, Phil adapted Someone Else’s War into a play Of Forgetting, which is being staged at Melbourne’s La Mama theatre in September 2024. In April 2024 the play was shortlisted for the Cooper Prize for playwriting, winning a commendation (see Phil’s Diary page to follow his journey as a playwright and historian).

In his journalism career, Phil worked in South Africa training SABC journalists in the months after Nelson Mandela came to power. He was also the ABC’s National Journalism trainer and worked for UNICEF in Vietnam. For a Churchill Fellowship in 2002, he travelled to the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany and the Netherlands to study how journalists are trained to deal with trauma. During this trip he lectured at the University of Washington & Michigan State University, and gave a seminar at Oxford. His findings were published widely across the world. Phil also taught broadcast journalism at RMIT and La Trobe universities in Melbourne. In 2019 he won the inaugural JERAA national teaching award for the first live TV student broadcast of the 2019 Federal Election from the RMIT studios.

Phil’s academic listing can be found at https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8758-1327