Biography

Dennis Glover is a professional speechwriter and author.

He has worked as a policy adviser and speechwriter on the staff of Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, Mark Latham, Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan, and has written speeches for many other ministers and opposition leaders at the federal and state levels. His current clients include senior political, business, community, public sector and academic leaders.

He contributes essays and comment to Fairfax newspapers, the ABC and other media. He has in the past written opinion for the Australian Financial Review and The Australian. His essay 'Doveton' appeared in The Best Australian Essays 2014. Dennis also comments on political and cultural matters on radio and television.

Dennis is the author of The Art of Great Speeches (CUP 2010) and Orwell’s Australia (Scribe 2003).

His latest non-fiction book is An Economy is not a society: Winners and losers in the new Australia (Black Inc. 2015), which examines the effect on Australia of the policies of creative destruction over the last 30 years. His debut novel The Last Man in Europe (Black Inc. July 2017) tells the story of how George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was published in the UK in September 2017, by the Overlook Press in the US in November 2017, and by Polygon in the UK and Europe in 2021. It is published with a companion edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four containing a new introduction and note on the text in which Dennis explains his new findings on the publication history of Orwell's great novel. His second novel, Factory 19, is an arcadian story about the now lost factory world and life as it was lived before the internet and the mobile phone. His third novel, Thaw (Black Inc. 2023) retells the Scott of the Antarctic legend for the era of climate change.

Dennis has edited two volumes of Labor Essays and has contributed to numerous edited collections of academic and political books.

Dennis graduated B.A. with first class honors from Monash University in 1987, winning the Ian Turner Prize for history. He also graduated PhD in history from the University of Cambridge in 1996, where he was a Cambridge Australia Scholar and a member of King's College. His doctoral thesis was on the classical origins of the political thought of the Leveller movement in the English Revolution.  

While at King's he worked as a conservator of the private book collection of John Maynard Keynes.

He is a frequent guest lecturer on speech-writing at various Australian universities and schools and lectures on speech-writing for the Institute of Public Administration Australia, the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University.

Dennis was a founding fellow of the think tank Per Capita.