

After the Smoke Clears investigates how an Australian town transitions from coal to renewables.
Writer / Digital Journalist / Data Developer. Prefers Soviet weather. Speaks Russian. Enjoys maps and maths, covering politics and populism, foreign and domestic.
Worked for ABC. Written for Crikey, ABC and Random House.
Book: The Red Wake (2016) Random House.
Not afraid of flying only of staying put.
Travel writing, politics and history...
Kurt Johnson's extensive journey through contemporary Russia and its old satellites is a vivid portrait of how the ghost of that order still haunts the present. But it is also underpinned by a strong family tale, his grandparents having fled communist Czechoslovakia, part of the story taking place in the family's substantial old summer house with the Kafka-esque name, the Castle. He visits the last existing gulag and the ex-KGB headquarters in Moscow. The writing ... has an evocative immediacy, is historically informed and nuanced, ideologically alert and alive to Western narratives and Russian revisionist nostalgia.
Steven Carroll, The Age