Jonathan Rush

Jonathan Rush grew up in Europe and Australia. Most of his schooling was at Hale School, Western Australia followed by a couple of years at Cranleigh School in England. He graduated in 1972 from Surrey University where he studied civil engineering. He worked in Switzerland, the UK and the Netherlands. In 1978 he took up a job in Tehran where he lived, together with his new wife, Jenny, through the Iranian revolution after which they moved to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. His last job in the Middle East was as the Gulf marketing manager for a firm of project managers. He subsequently returned to Australia where he joined his brother’s firm of public relations consultants in Perth. In 1987 Jonathan and his family moved to England to live in Chalfont St Peter, a large village near London where he lives to this day. In 2003 he became severely ill. As part of his rehabilitation in 2004 he started writing My Persian Girl. While in Iran, Jenny and he had witnessed at first hand street and roof top gun battles, bombings, and demonstrations of a million people. They had travelled widely in Iran and Jonathan’s knowledge of the country and its people and ethnic diversity informed much of the book. A close family connection led to him reading the unpublished personal papers of Win Bisset and in due course writing A Remarkable Stillness. He found his research for the book in turn fascinating, depressing, joyful and ultimately uplifting. Dylan Thomas’ beautiful, sad words resonated deeply with him: ‘Though lovers be lost, love shall not. And death shall have no dominion.’ A Remarkable Stillness was published by West Australian publisher, Leschenault Press, in March 2024.