Author Peter FitzSimons will launch his new book about "Australia's greatest frontline soldier" in Newcastle on Remembrance Day.
The event, to be held at MacLean's Booksellers in Hamilton on Monday night, is titled The Legend of Albert Jacka.
Jacka was awarded Australia's first Victoria Cross (VC) of World War I for killing seven Turks at a trench in Gallipoli.
He killed five with his rifle and two with his bayonet. It was May 1915.
Jacka's actions stopped a Turkish incursion, which FitzSimons described as "the biggest threat to the ANZACS since the beginning of the Gallipoli landing".
Jacka, then 22, performed his heroics through desperation as fellow Diggers lay dead or dying in the trenches around him.
He became a national hero.
FitzSimons said Jacka could have earned the VC three to four times throughout his military career.
"The blokes who fought with Jacka never said they were with the 14th Battalion," he said.
"They would say "we're with Jacka". They were so proud of fighting with him. When he died, his coffin was borne by eight winners of the VC. They came from all over Australia. That's a testament to the man's bravery."
FitzSimons said Jacka "left for war more anonymous than a lost dog".
"He returned to 200,000 people in the streets because he was the country's most famous and revered man."
He died at age 39 from kidney disease, possibly linked to a German mustard gas attack in France in 1918.
Almost 6000 people paid their respects as he lay in his coffin at Anzac House in Melbourne.
FitzSimons said it defied reason that Jacka survived the war, given "the risks he took and bravery he displayed".
"Jacka was unbelievably calm in the face of extraordinary risks and amazing danger. The other guys sensed it and they followed him."
FitzSimons recalled "rising tension and anxiety" as a Wallaby facing the All Blacks.
"Then I'd look around and go, 'I've got Tommy Lawton on my side, so I've got a chance'.
"Jacka was like that. He gave the other blokes confidence."
FitzSimons has written about a book a year, sometimes two, since his first one in 1991.
"It doesn't feel like work. It feels like 'you bloody beauty'.
"When I started doing journalism, I kept a huge scrapbook of every piece I wrote."
Three years into his career, he broke up with his then-girlfriend.
"I was feeling very lost and low. I opened the scrapbook of the writing I'd done. As absurd as this might sound, it felt like I was with a group of friends.
"And when I read back my books, they're more than friends, they're family."
His first war book, a biography of Nancy Wake, came "out of the clear blue sky when I was approached to write it".
"I never thought it would sell, but it sold about 200,000 copies," he said.
"That was my publisher's first clue that there was a hunger for Australian stories told in the Australian vernacular."
FitzSimons grew up at Peats Ridge on the Central Coast.
"My parents are buried there and I'll be buried there," he said.
"When I was growing up, Newcastle was the big smoke to the north and Sydney was the glowing lights to the south.
"It was a wonderful part of the world to grow up. Both my parents served in the Second World War."
When he was born, his dad was 45.
"My sister says reading my books is like talking to Dad."
