Peter Mathers (1931 in England – 8 November 2004 in Melbourne) was an English-born Australian author and playwright. Mathers completed his first novel, Trap, in 1966. It won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, an inventive and often comic novel concerning the escapades and family history of Jack Trap, an urban mixed-blood Aborigine in what was then a society racially divided by the White Australia Policy. His second novel, The Wort Papers (1972), ranged across the country in rural settings from the Kimberley to dairy country in northern New South Wales, and further established his reputation as a stylistic innovator and satirist. Mathers wrote radio plays, articles and published many stories in magazines, journals and newspapers before beginning a substantial playwriting career. He lived in Melbourne for many years prior to his death in 2004.