author
Sydney Loch
1889–1954
A Gallipoli veteran turned writer and relief worker, he brought the shock of war to the page with unusual honesty. His life later widened far beyond the battlefield, taking him into refugee work and community-building in Greece with his wife, Joice Loch.
3 Audiobooks
Pelican Pool: A Novel
by Sydney Loch
The Straits Impregnable
by Sydney Loch
Ireland in Travail
by Joice NanKivell Loch, Sydney Loch
About the author
Born in London in 1889 and raised in Scotland, Sydney Loch moved to Australia as a teenager and worked as a jackaroo before serving in the First AIF during the Gallipoli campaign. Wounded and ill after the fighting, he transformed those experiences into The Straits Impregnable (1916), a vivid account first presented as fiction to get around wartime censorship.
He wrote under the name Sydney de Loghe and continued to publish work shaped by war, displacement, and the lives of ordinary people caught in upheaval. Records of his papers also show that he left behind autobiographical writing, poems, and a play, suggesting a lifelong commitment to writing in several forms.
After marrying writer and humanitarian Joice NanKivell, he moved overseas and became deeply involved in relief work. The couple worked with refugees in Europe and later made a long home in Ouranoupoli, Greece, where Sydney Loch became closely connected with the region and wrote about Mount Athos as well as the people and history around it.