A new book by Australian sports writer and author Graham Chapman is being published by the prestigious Macmillan.
It is the first book written about his childhood and his rise to success in sports journalism, which began in the mid-1980s as a student at the University of New South Wales.
Chapman says his parents were not the most popular people in their own country, and were “not particularly wealthy”.
“I remember when I was three, my parents weren’t rich,” he said.
“They didn’t have many friends in their home, so we were taught by our grandparents that we didn’t really have a lot of friends in our school.”
And when I grew up, they went to work every day, so I never really had the opportunity to be part of a family.
“Chapmans father was an engineer, and he describes his father as a man who never had a job and worked all the time.”
He worked as an engineer for over 30 years, and never took a vacation, so he was a very busy guy,” he told ABC News.
Chappmans father also worked at a nuclear power plant.”
I think he got a lot out of the work, and there was a lot he liked about it,” Chapman said.
In his book, The Art Of The Story, Chapman describes his childhood as a time of hardship, but says he had a chance to see a lot more of Australia than he had in his first few years.”
My family was not the kind of people who would be able to afford the big ticket sports events, so they just didn’t get the chance to go to the games,” Chapman told ABC Radio Melbourne.”
So I grew into a very competitive kid.
I did well in school and I got to go on to play football for my high school and rugby league.
“But the best part was I got a really good education.
I got an English degree from a top university and that’s when I went into journalism.”
The book starts off with a pretty dark and grim view of Australia, and it’s really, really well written.
“Chappman says the book is about the journey of a young sports writer who grew up in the city of Melbourne, but was forced to make a choice.”
There were so many opportunities and it was a choice I had to make,” he wrote.”
To be honest, I would have loved to have been a journalist from the age of 11 to 14 years old.
But when I did finally graduate from university, the book was really about the sport and the people and the places I went to.
“As I progressed in my career, I became interested in all things sports, but the most important thing was to be an athlete.”
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