“After you write four different stories on four different topics every week for 40 years, suddenly you know a little bit more than if you hadn’t.”
Physicist, medical doctor, engineer, TV weatherman, roadie, car mechanic, taxi driver, labourer: Karl Sven Woytek Sas Konkovitch Matthew Kruszelnicki has worn a lot of hats in his time. But now, the beloved Australian author and science communicator, known affectionately as Dr Karl, calls himself “just a storyteller”.
Born in Helsingborg, Sweden, to Polish parents, Rina and Ludwik, who were Holocaust survivors, Karl and his family fled the country in 1950 in response to mounting fear of a Russian invasion. Bound for the United States, by some quirk of fate, they ended up boarding a boat to Australia after a young Karl had a fever reaction following the smallpox vaccine. “The reaction went away. The ship went away. The next ship coming was going to Australia. That’s how we ended up [here]. Things like that happen to refugees,” he shares. The
