Author: David Prater (page 7 of 25)

David Prater is an Australian-born writer, editor and parent. His interests include mince pies, ice hockey and Joy Division.

View his full biography.

28 August 2021 / 0 Comments

10K Ultra (JK)

Anyone who’s known me for longer than five minutes might want to sit down for this post.

Today I ran a 10-kilometre race for the first time in my 49 years on this mortal coil.

I’m now collapsed on the couch having applied a full bag of peas to my right knee, imbibed an ibuprofen-paracetamol cocktail and cracked a packet of S&V chips, shortly to be washed down with a crisp ginger beer courtesy of Coop.

You may call this living the dream.

I call it a midlife crisis dressed up as a cry for help.

For reasons of modesty, I’ll leave it to your imagination to calculate my new personal-best time.

Feel free to AMA.

#nescafe4percent #tyvmi #AO

16 July 2021 / 0 Comments

Considerations for Mission Leadership in UN Peace Operations

I’m really proud to have played a small part in helping the International Forum for the Challenges of Peace Operations put together the second edition of its groundbreaking study on leadership in UN peace operations, Considerations for Mission Leadership in UN Peace Operations.

My role in the project entailed editing and bringing together six chapters written and reviewed by multiple authors into a coherent whole, adapting an existing InDesign template to produce web- and print-ready versions, and then uploading and publishing the entire report on PressBooks.


It’s probably one of the most complex projects I’ve worked on as a freelancer, and it gave me a whole bunch of insights into the pros and cons of desktop publishing using standard tools versus more agile (yet in other aspects limited) single-source publishing software.

I’d like to write more about that soon but for now, thanks to Sharon Wiharta and the Challenges Forum team for taking me on, and I trust the report will prove useful to its target audiences in the peace operations community worldwide.

31 May 2021 / 0 Comments

Dag Hammarskjöld’s 1961 Oxford lecture: Three untold stories

Scene: The Sheldonian Theatre at the University of Oxford, Tuesday 30 May 1961. Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, is the guest of honour.

Dressed in academic garb, Hammarskjöld remains seated while the Vice Chancellor recites a text in Latin conferring on him an honorary doctorate in civil law. An arcane set of gestures follows: cap dipping, presentations, more Latin.

At the end of the ceremony, Hammarskjöld delivers a lecture (in English, thankfully), entitled ‘The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact’. While the true history of the lecture, which the Foundation has just reissued, could fill a book, in this post I’d like to focus on the untold stories behind three known versions of the text.

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13 March 2021 / 0 Comments

Stéphane Mallarmé is dead: all praise the empty page!

Stéphane Mallarmé is dead. Long may his absence linger. Long may the horrifying abyss of the white (and black) pages confound we poets, prattlers and plagiarists. And long may we question the substance of our languages, the correspondences between organic, systemic lifeforms and the unstoppable progress of symbols: numbers, letters, marks, voids . . .

One hundred years have passed since the death of one of France’s most enigmatic and curious poets. And yet for one hundred chaotic and turbulent years editors and publishers all over the world have surveyed poems, articles, essays and stories stamped with Mallarmé’s indelible influence, brushed with his unmistakable reverie.

In the same way, his paradoxical presence could be felt at the Mallarmé Writers’ Event, a small-scale but intense seminar held at the Alliance Française de Melbourne on 8–9 October 1998. The event was a celebration as much of Australian writings and writers as of Mallarmé himself.

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Eksell WordPress theme screenshot
A screenshot of the Eksell WordPress portfolio theme by Anders Norén.
13 March 2021 / 1 Comment

Eksell WordPress theme

It feels like I only changed the WordPress theme for this site a week ago. But I’m doing it all over again today, by installing an early version of the Eksell WordPress theme by Anders Norén.

To be fair to myself, the last time I switched themes was back in September 2019, when I opted for Chaplin, another stellar theme by Anders Norén.

At the time, I claimed I made that switch because of the number of spam emails I was getting from WordPress developers offering to redesign my site. In reality, those emails haven’ stopped, and I guess they never will.

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This is [d/dn], the home of David Prater, a writer and editor currently living in the third person.

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