Steve Pennells
Steve Pennells is a five-time Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist who joined Sunday Night in 2013.
He began his career in newspapers in country WA before joining The West Australian, becoming its state political editor.
After a stint with the Nine Network and four years freelancing in Europe, he returned to ‘The West’ as chief writer – a roving local and foreign brief which saw him dropped at short notice into trouble spots around the world.
The role took him to Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan, China, Europe, the US and across South-East Asia, and included lengthy assignments covering the tsunami, earthquakes, natural disasters and terrorism across Asia and Africa. He also spent time in Australia’s north-west writing a series of award-winning stories exposing widespread child abuse and neglect.
Steve is also an accomplished photojournalist. In 2005, he was the only Australian to have his work selected for The Press Photographers’ Year, a book and exhibition at London’s Royal National Theatre representing the world’s best photojournalists.
In 2012, he received Australia’s highest journalism honour – the Gold Walkley Award – for his stories from the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan and reports on Gina Rinehart’s battle with her children, an investigation which also saw him embroiled in a lengthy legal battle with the mining magnate.
He has won four other Walkleys, the Clarion Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism and has been awarded the United Nations Media Peace Prize a record six times. He has won the Arthur Lovekin Prize for Journalist of the Year three years in a row.
In 2011, he was named by Media Week magazine as one of the top 25 people currently working in the Australian media.
His work on Sunday Night has included investigations into the Simon Gittany and Oscar Pistorius cases, the Syrian refugee crisis, Ivan Milat’s unknown first victim, the Claremont serial killings, the Rothschild Prayerbook, the woman known as the Bali Black Widow, mining heiress Olivia Mead’s first interview and a global investigation into international tax evasion.
