About

Anthony Cree

Anthony Cree is married with three grown-up children and five grandchildren. He divides his life between Australia, where he has held a number of senior academic posts, and Oxford, where he holds a visiting fellowship and works with the World Literacy Foundation.

He is better known for his academic work, in particular Cree’s Dictionary of Latin Quotations, and biographies of various philosophers, including Schopenhauer, of whom he had a special interest. Cree taught at Eastbourne College, where the philosopher was sent to study by his anglophile father. He has also written novels, including the Prague Road Trilogy, set in the last days of Dubček’s Czechoslovakia.

He is the founder of the Aboriginal Literacy Foundation in Australia and is currently Chair of the World Literacy Council. In 2012, he was awarded the Order of Australia.

Books

  • A Short Walk in White Africa

    A Short Walk in White Africa describes three months spent travelling in Southern Africa in the last years of apartheid and colonial rule, while returning to his University in England. It is a record of a way of life now as departed as the ante bellum world of the southern states of America. The seeming compliance of the Indigenous population is only occasionally broken, and when that does happen, it provides an insight into the coming decades. Some will see this as simply a "romp" around Africa by an undergraduate having an extended gap year, but others might find it a useful insight not only into past, but also as an account of human nature, whereby what is expected to happen in history almost never does, and the most unlikely outcomes seem to prevail.

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