Michael Fitzgerald grew up in Melbourne and moved to Sydney in the early 1990s to work on Time Warner Inc.’s launch of the celebrity magazine Who. He later became the South Pacific arts editor of Time, and for the past two decades has been an art magazine editor, most recently with Art Monthly Australasia. He made his literary debut in 2017 with The Pacific Room, a fictional speculation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels through Oceania, followed by Pietà (2021), inspired by the restoration of Michelangelo’s sculpture. Late is his third novel.