Nicholas Evans is head of the Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. He has worked on a wide variety of Australian Aboriginal languages as linguist, anthropologist and interpreter, and has recent extended his fieldwork into Papuan languages of the Trans-Fly region. He has written widely both on Aboriginal languages and across a broad spectrum of general linguistic topics, including grammars of Kayardild (1995) and Bininj Gun-wok (2003), dictionaries of Kayardild (1992) and Dalabon (2004, with Francesca Merlan and Maggie Tukumba), plus edited books on linguistics and archaeology (with Patrick McConvell), on polysynthesis (with Hans-Jürgen Sasse), on the classification of north Australian languages, and on grammar-writing (Catching Language: the standing challenge of grammar writing, with Felix Ameka and Alan Dench).