Bernard Zuel (born 1965, Rose-Hill, Mauritius) is an Australian music journalist. Zuel wrote for Fairfax Media newspapers The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald from 1992 to 2017. He became their senior music writer and reviewer. Zuel is a judge of the Australian Music Prize award. At the end of June 2017 he left Fairfax Media to become a freelance journalist and also taught music journalism.

Bernard Zuel was born in 1965 Rose-Hill, Mauritius.^[1][2] In the late 1960s, with his family, father Cyril, mother Irlande and two younger siblings, he relocated to Australia and settled in Sydney.^[1][2]

In the podcast Penmanship (2016), Zuel told Andrew McMillen how he wrote his first review when he was 20-years-old on R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), which he submitted to street press.^[3] He was surprised to find it was published and worked for street press before he got a job as a general news reporter at The Penrith Press. He worked there for a few years before starting at The Sydney Morning Herald in 1992, where he became the senior music writer and reviewer.^[4][5]

Zuel regularly talks music on ABC local radio and appears on The Right Note. After 25 years at The Sydney Morning Herald, he left in June 2017 to become a freelance journalist at his website and to teach music journalism.^[5]