Gregory David Roberts

Australian author and escaped convict whose autobiographical novel Shantaram draws on his years living in the Bombay underworld after escaping from an Australian prison.

Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne in 1952. After a series of heroin addictions and armed robberies, he was sentenced to nineteen years in prison. In 1980 he escaped from Pentridge Prison in Melbourne — at the time the largest prison escape in Australian history — and fled to Bombay, where he lived for ten years under a false identity.

In Bombay he worked as a street doctor in the slums, ran a currency operation, acted as a Bollywood extra, and became involved with the city’s criminal underworld and its connections to the Mumbai mafia and Afghan mujahideen. He was eventually captured in Germany and returned to Australia to complete his sentence.

Shantaram — the Marathi word meaning ‘man of God’s peace’ — is a fictionalised account of these years, written twice (the first manuscript was destroyed by prison guards) and published in 2003. Though categorised as fiction, it is widely understood as substantially autobiographical. Roberts now lives in Mumbai.