He is notable for his work on the Australian ABC Classic radio station, as well as for his numerous charitable efforts and memoirs about his transition as a transgender man.
He was two when his parents separated,[3] leaving his mother, Anna,[4] to bring up four children aged within four and a half years of one another, living in a small house.
[6] He graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and did further studies at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where he received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship; at the Royal Academy in London, with the assistance of a Countess of Munster Musical Trust scholarship; and at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.
[2] Ayres moved from Hong Kong to Australia in February 2003,[2] living in Melbourne and cycling to work each day.
[12] In October 2014, ABC FM radio's Classic Breakfast website announced that he had "chosen to hang up [his] headphones and move on to new adventures".
[4] Lunchbox/Soapbox at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne in January 2015 featured Ayres presenting The Viola: A big violin, a small cello, or just a joke?
[15] Later that year he moved to Kabul, where he began teaching violin, viola and cello at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music.
[28] Ayres has been involved in the Melbourne-based charity Hush Foundation, which uses the arts to improve young patients' lives in hospitals.
[31] A friend of Ayres, Carol "Charlie" Le Brocq, offered assistance and support during his gender transition in 2016, and they subsequently fell in love and became partners.
[33] Artist Jaq Grantford asked Le Brocq's permission to paint a portrait of him, and he requested to be represented as a centaur.
He said that he had first realised he was a man during a cycling trip in Pakistan in 2013 in a "total beam of light" moment one evening while watching the film Boys Don't Cry.
It tells the story of Ayres, then named Emma, cycling his way from England to Hong Kong with a violin strapped to his back.
In his last three months in Afghanistan, after he returned from his mastectomy, he began living as a man, riding motorcycles around Kabul wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt.
The book ends back in Australia with Eddie's first testosterone injection to initiate the chemical change to a man.
[41][42] On 17 November he appeared at Avid Reader's first Summer Reading Guide launch of the 2017 season with author Robert Whyte in presentations followed by a joint discussion.
[43] Ayres wrote about Danger Music for The Guardian; "Moving to a war zone was better than living with what was in my head" appeared on Sunday 24 September 2017, essentially an excerpt from the book (p. 5).