TaNIa Peitzker's eshop will be opening in Q1 2027 in Deutschland!
Cairns-Born Author & AI Pioneer Hits the Big Time — And She's Home to Talk About It
PART ONE OF TWO — this release anchors Dr Peitzker's background and life story as the writer. A second press release, about the book itself (its chapters, motivation, frameworks and reviews), will follow. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TWO PART PRESS RELEASE FOR AI. CIVILITY. CLIMATE.MULTILINGUAL BOOK PROMOTIONSYDNEY, NSW, CAIRNS, QLD FAMILY TREESDESLEY PUDNIKS NEE MARSH & SIDNEY STANLEY MARSH, MARRIED LILLIE MAY THORNTONAUSTRALIAN FAMILY HISTORYBENDIGO, VICTORIA AND RURAL VICTORIAN RELATIVES, ALSO MELBOURNE.GERMAN FAMILY HISTORYABOUT AI. CIVILITY. CLIMATE. WAYS TO MOVE FORWARD.MUNICH & BONN BOOK LAUNCHES 2026
PR Team
10/21/20265 min read
PART ONE OF TWO — this release anchors Dr Peitzker's background and life story as the writer. A second press release, about the book itself (its chapters, motivation, frameworks and reviews), will follow.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Cairns-Born Author & AI Pioneer Hits the Big Time — And She's Home to Talk About It
Dr Tania Peitzker launches AI. Civility. Climate. Ways to Move Forward. Published in New York and stocked in prestigious bookstores around the world.
CAIRNS, AUSTRALIA, November 2026 — From Tropical North Queensland to shelves across the globe, Cairns-born-and-bred author, academic and AI technologist Dr Tania Peitzker has done her hometown proud. She is currently on sabbatical in Cairns, the town of her birth, before heading back to her adopted hometowns of Flensburg, Germany and Toulon, France — and then jetting off on a European book tour.
Her latest book, AI. Civility. Climate. Ways to Move Forward. (Business Expert Press, New York, 2026) was written during her last months' long stay in the Cairns summer of 2025-26. It has been selling internationally since before it was even published: pre-orders opened in March and kept the registers running ahead of the official launch at the end of August this year.
The book opens with an image unmistakably Cairns: the ferris wheel and a super yacht in the marina, with the rainforest of Trinity Inlet as a backdrop, followed by a photo of Dr Peitzker herself on the Cairns Esplanade, the inlet behind her. And yes, it closes with a tropical "carpet snake" or python that made itself at home in her family house in Brinsmead. Only in Cairns.
Readers Down Under have already had their say, with Australian reviewers joining an international chorus praising the book's practical take on the uses and risks of AI, climate-conscious technology and civic behaviour.
Peitzker's third commissioned work from BEP, the ebook in colour and B&W paperback is now stocked in numerous prestigious bookstores worldwide — from the Harvard Bookstore to Oxford's Blackwell's, alongside major retailers like Walmart, with many outlets across Australia as well, including iconic bookstores in Sydney and Melbourne. The full list is available on the author's portal: https://www.taniapeitzker.com/aicivilityclimate-appliedai-strategies.
A local girl made good
Dr Peitzker has been part of the Cairns community on and off ever since she left in 1988 to study a double degree Arts/Law at the University of Queensland. Post-pandemic, she returned for three months at a time to help care for her elderly mother. During those difficult stays, she didn't slow down: she did pro bono work out at the JCU Ideas Lab at James Cook University, mentoring startups and giving talks and Q&As. Student and entrepreneur testimonials from that period can be found on her LinkedIn profile; other industry and government testimonials are on her Author Portal taniapeitzker.com
At the time she was also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Silicon Valley (USV, formerly Cogswell College), teaching metaverses and immersive technologies. All that, while somehow finding time to write a book about saving the planet from both bad manners and bad technology.
"My whole AI career started with FNQ-inspired common sense," she says. "Cairns taught me you can't have a thriving environment without a thriving community, and the same goes for the digital world."
She added that some of her fondest memories of her youth were sailing the family catamaran around Double and Scout Hat Islands, being a Nipper and lifeguard at Palm Cove Surf Lifesaving Club, riding her BMX bike from Freshie Creek to the beaches near Smithy High, school hockey matches, piano exams with visiting British judges, along with regular Eisteddfods for poetry and music recitals.
A true Australian blend
The Peitzker story is Australia's story. Her mother, Desley, was sixth or seventh generation Australian — the Patersons and Thorntons were merchants, tradies and military people — descended from the Shire President of Bendigo during the Gold Rush in the mid 1880s. Her father arrived on an Australian government organised "immigration ship" as a child from postwar Germany. The result: a good blend of deep Aussie roots and European renewal, which might explain why her book about AI, civility and climate speaks to both sides of the world.
The family's service record runs deep. Her NSW grandfather Stan Marsh fought the Japanese in Southeast Asia and was something of a war hero; as a courageous mechanic from coastal Bulli, he was seconded to England to learn how to fly and salvage crashed Spitfires and other WWII aircraft before being deployed on rescue missions in PNG and the Pacific. Her Newcastle-raised, then Sydneysider grandma, Lillie, was in the Women's Auxiliary. Like many Australian ex-servicepeople, nobody talked about it much, if at all.
Her German grandparents were Bavarian Jews who were part of the Resistance in Germany; her Opa was an elite mountaineering officer in the Germa military, while her Oma used to listen to the BBC "underground". Postwar, her Latvian step-grandfather Vikentijs or "Willie", emigrated with her father Karl and grandmother Elizabeth. Willie became a sugar industry foreman who cut cane by hand in Redlynch Valley where her Dad's family, including his half brother Harry Pudniks, lived on the farm before moving to Kamerunga Road in Freshwater. And both of her parents were primary and secondary teachers who, between them, shaped her life in Cairns, from the classroom to the community.
From Brissie to Berlin — and back again
After Cairns and the BA/LLB studies at the University of Queensland, Dr Peitzker left Brisbane for Nuremberg, but not before her first play "Life With Marion" was produced in Brissie, playing sell-out seasons at the Cement Box and the Metro Arts Theatre. "Young Peitzker" had also become known in the QLD capital for Australia's first ever radio show dedicated to women composers; "Why Not Women?" at 4MBS, on behalf of the New Yorker global org, ILWC. The International League of Women Composers had the Brisbane-based composers Betty Beath and Mary Mageau as leading members, for whom Peitzker organised a concert at the QLD State Library auditorium in the early 1990s.
In Bavaria and her later "stomping ground" "post Wall" Berlin, Tania kept on writing. Offered a German Government and university scholarship, Peitzker completed the first-ever PhD on the world-famous Australian author, playwright and feminist Dymphna Cusack for which she won several national and international awards. After completing the dissertation at Germany's elite University of Potsdam, and almost a decade of partying and activism in Berlin, she relocated to Switzerland for a few years (Tania's Kindle ebooks on Amazon and her blogger.com memoirs capture the era in full colour).
She went on to write for The Wall Street Journal after being recruited and mentored by a Pulitzer Prize winning editor in the Berlin bureau. He had read her work on innovation and knowledge transfer news as a long time stringer for the Londoner Times Higher Education Supplement (now called THE). She was then headhunted by swissinfo and moved to Berne. There she ended up being mentored by a famous Swiss entrepreneur to become one herself and never looked back. Peitzker ran creative industries consultancies in Berlin and London before moving into AI and various chatbot ventures in the UK, Australia and Germany. It was her entrepreneurship that led to her professorship in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Archived for posterity — at 24
Remarkably, when Dr Peitzker first left Australia at the age of 24, the University of Queensland's Fryer Library — the State's premier collection of "notable Queenslanders" — acquired her papers. The collection, catalogued as the Tania Peitzker Collection (UQFL310), now holds material spanning her whole life, and she has continued donating materials ever since that first acquisition. How many 24-year-olds leave the country and take their place in the university archives on the way out?
The interview window
Dr Peitzker is available for media interviews up until 17 November 2026, when the European book tour takes over. She'll be telling audiences in Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy and France about AI, civility and climate — but Cairns gets her first.
About Dr Tania Peitzker
Dr Tania Peitzker is a Cairns-born author, academic and AI technologist specialising in conversational AI, immersive interfaces and sustainable digital cultures. Her earlier work includes Uses and Risks of Business Chatbots and twenty years of pioneering AI pilots across Europe, from hologram concierges in Cologne to tourism assistants in Lindau. Her full track record is at safegreenai.com.
Media enquiries / interview bookings: in person in Cairns are only available until 17 November, 2026. Thereafter via the Author Portal, taniapeitzker.com.
