David
Astle

David Astle is a wordsmith across page, stage and airwaves. Whether he’s hosting the Evenings show on ABC Radio Victoria or playing umpire on SBS' Letters and Numbers – plus the Celebrity versions that followed.

David's other passion lies in the cryptic crosswords that appear weekly in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Loved or loathed as the setter DA, David is a verbal wizard, playing with puns, codes, double-meanings and every other recipe from his lifelong book of spells.

With a rare knack for wordplay, David is tailor-made puzzles, riddles, clues and other creative challenges for any occasion. An exuberant speaker, David can offer a dynamic crash-course into cryptic solving, enthralling a room in word games.

With over 30 years as Australia's leading puzzler, David has also many offbeat tales of language and inspiration to share, from jargon to metaphor.

Guaranteed to fire up the brain, David’s sessions are filled with lateral thinking and creativity, relying on games, challenges, and plenty of laughs to mobilise your imagination and enhance learning.

As a seamless radio host, David is also an accomplished MC and interviewer, able to engage across a spectrum of topics and disciplines.

David is the weekly Wordplay columnist for the Saturday Herald and The Age, unravelling language topics as diverse as AI-speak, pollywaffle, endangered words, kid-talk, buzzwords, clichés and misnomers. Wherever words can be found, David is nearby with unique insights to offer.

His first language book, Puzzled: Secrets and Clues from a Life Lost in Words (2010), captures the puzzle mania through his life, and wordplay through history too, from Pompeii's magic squares to the great Scrabble revolt of 2008. Built around a central crossword, Puzzled is a book you solve as you read, clue-by-clue, chapter-by-chapter. A contorting ride that David can also offer in person.

His latest book, Rewording The Brain (2018) explores the cognitive benefits of wordplay. From memory to eureka, play to connection, the book includes research, revelations and riddles, including his own experience of solving 300 cryptic clues inside an fMRI.