Erik Jensen

Erik Jensen is an Australian journalist and author, known for his 2014 biography of artist Adam Cullen, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen, and as founding editor of The Saturday Paper. Early life Jensen went to primary school in Fiji, attending a Methodist school for a while. He said that it was while he was there that he discovered that his parents were "godless", so he prayed for them for about six months before he "left God at about six and a half". Career Jensen started writing for music magazines when he was 15, and The Sydney Morning Herald employed him as a critic when he was 16. After finishing high school, the Herald took him on as a news reporter, a role he was in for five years, until at the age of 23 he became summer editor at the paper. While he was at the Herald, he won a Walkley Award for Young Print Journalist of the Year in 2010. In 2008, Archibald Prize-winning artist Adam Cullen asked Jensen to live with him and write his biography. He stayed for about four years, in the role of observer as Cullen dealt in drugs and was arraigned for weapons possession. Jensen was even shot in the leg by Cullen, to prove his commitment to the book. After Cullen's death in 2012, Jensen completed and published his biography, titled Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen. He later said "...I allowed myself to be in fairly traumatic settings during that book, because I had convinced myself that the professional response was to be absent from them" and that he "[needed] to continue working on the project to properly extricate [himself] from it".