Michael Keon was a part of the group of writers who gathered at Heide around John and Sunday Reed during the late thirties and early forties. His autobiography records his friendship with the Reeds, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Max Harris and Sidney Nolan. 'Journalist, writer, and supposed spy, Michael Keon has lived a life full of colour and paradox. Born in 1918, and brought up in relative comfort in Melbourne, Keon decided that journalism (and writing for Keith Murdoch's Herald and Weekly Times newspaper), was to be his career of choice. At the end of the Second World War, he took up a position as Australian Press Attaché in China - where he would witness the Communist revolution, and play his own small part in the game of political brinkmanship that became the Cold War.' (Summary of an ABC/ RN programme on Keon)

Keon has also written a book about Korean politics, Korean Phoenix (1977).