Michael Moran has led a varied and adventurous life. Born and educated in Australia and Europe, he spent his twenties wandering the islands of Polynesia and Melanesia. He finally settled among the descendants of the Bounty mutiny on Norfolk Island off the eastern Australian coast. As the Broadcasting Officer for the Administration, he helped establish the radio station.

Subsequently pursuing a career in music, he studied the piano and harpsichord professionally in London for many years, facilitated by his academic work as an English teacher. He has lectured on a variety of subjects, ranging from the music of Fryderyk Chopin and François Couperin to British art and architecture and the colonial history and culture of the South Pacific region. His historical novel, Point Venus, set in the former British penal settlement on Norfolk Island, was successfully published in Australia. (Brandl & Schlesinger, Sydney 1998). Posted for some years to Poland shortly after the fall of communism, his life-long fascination with Melanesia drew him to the work of the enigmatic Polish anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski. This encounter and an abiding interest in the German Pacific Empire precipitated his latest return to the South Seas. Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific was the fruit of this expedition through the island provinces of Papua New Guinea (HarperCollins, London 2003 and Flamingo 2004). The book was short-listed for the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. His book A Country in the Moon : Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland was published by Granta in London in 2008. This cultural odyssey and residence book chronicles his adventures in Poland immediately following the fall of communism and the transition to the market economy. It remains popular and has become the classic introduction to the country for the intelligent general reader. In April 2017 Moran was awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award in Travel Literature for this work jointly by the University of Florida and the Eric Friedheim Foundation in New York.

In 2011 he was awarded a literary grant by the Australia Council to write the biography of his grand uncle, the once internationally famous but now forgotten Australian concert pianist Edward Cahill. A severely edited version of his colourful life featured in the Prologue to A Country in the Moon. The book entitled The Pocket Paderewski: The Beguiling Life of the Australian Concert Pianist Edward Cahill was published in November 2016 by Australian Scholarly Publishing. Historic recordings of Chopin and Liszt made by Cahill in the 1950s are available through an internet link printed in the book.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a lecturer there and an incessant traveller, he lives and works in Warsaw, Sydney and London.