Murray Sayle studied at the University of Sydney and was editor of the student newspaper Honi Soit from 1944 to 1945. He left university to take up a cadetship with the Daily Telegraph before moving to the Daily Mirror. Sayle moved to the United Kingdom in 1952 to work for the Sunday tabloid People. In 1960 he joined the staff of the Sunday Times. (Sayles' novel A Crooked Sixpence, first published in 1961 and re-published in 2008, charts the course of a young Australian journalist who goes to London to work on Fleet Street.)
In the 1970s Sayle worked in Asia for Newsweek before becoming a freelancer, living in Japan for over twenty years. Sayle worked extensively as a foreign correspondent including reporting on the Vietnam War, the Cuban revolution and conflicts in the Middle East, Northern Ireland and the Indian sub-continent.
Sayle was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in 2004 and returned to Australia at that time. In 2007, he received a doctorate of letters from the University of Sydney.
