Latest Programs
Wednesday 03 December 2008
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In contemporary culture we tend to think of the imagination as the highest creative impulse. The imagination is seen as the ultimate source of originality and original thinking is what marks a true artist. But from the antiquities to medieval times memory was highly valued. Both Aristotle and Chaucer thought memory the most important tool a writer or a reader could have. Renowned medieval scholar Mary Carruthers talks about the lost art of memory.
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(6.0MB)
The 'Huck Finn of the Hawkesbury' is how Robert Adamson was described by one reviewer when his first book was published in 1970. He's one of Australia's leading contemporary poets and a successful writer, editor and publisher. His autobiography Inside Out won the New South Wales Premier's History Award, and he received the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in literature. Robert Adamson's new collection of poetry The Golden Bird brings together the best of his published work as well as many new poems.
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(6.8MB)
Kate talks about her much-loved family.
Tuesday 02 December 2008
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Novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Jolley died in Perth in 2007 at the age of 83. Born in Birmingham in England, she came to Australia in 1959 with her husband, who had a job as a librarian at the University of Western Australia. Although she was trained as a nurse, she had a series of jobs -- for example as a door-to-door saleswoman selling soaps, jelly crystals and liquid manure, or as a cleaning lady -- all of which figured in her stories years later. In fact, according to her biographer Brian Dibble, much of her life, her relationships and the people she worked with and observed, appeared in her work.
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(14.3MB)
Enrique Vila-Matas has earned a reputation in Europe as one of Spain's most important living writers. Montano's Malady is the second of his novels to be translated into English. Don Anderson was so impressed by Vila-Matas's earlier book Bartleby & Co that he has read and re-read Montano's Malady for The Book Show. Although the book's described as a 'novel' he suggests it might be more useful to think of Vila-Matas as pioneering a new literary form. Some reviewers have found it hard going, but Don believes it's well worth the effort.
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(7.0MB)
It would seem that Kate comes from a long line of colourful characters, if the stories she tells of her family are anything to go by.
Monday 01 December 2008
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Literary critic Harold Bloom called it the 'death of art' but to some poets, slamming has given poetry a new life. From its beginning in Chicago in the 1980s, this cabaret style word duel has spread around the world—including to Australia. Since June, performance poets from Broome to Dubbo have competed in slam heats and the finalists are converging on Thursday 4 December at the Sydney Opera House for the Australian Poetry Slam final.
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(7.7MB)
Malla Nunn's novel A Beautiful Place to Die is a detective thriller set in 1950s South Africa. The dead body discovered in the opening pages is that of Captain Willem Pretorius, an Afrikaans Police Captain from the small backwater town of Jacob's Rest.
Detective Emanuel Cooper is sent to investigate, just before the Security Branch show up. This is a time when the colour of a person's skin was the most important thing about them, a time when mixed marriages were illegal and when Malla Nunn's parents were forced to make difficult choices about race.
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(2.8MB)
Christos Tsiolkas burst onto the literary scene in 1995 with the novel Loaded, and in 2006 won the Age Book of the Year fiction award for Dead Europe.
In his latest novel, The Slap, he explores the different reactions of friends at a barbecue to a child being slapped.
The novel is set in Melbourne and for The Book Show, reviewer Patricia Maunder takes a thought-provoking stroll through suburbia, and discovers the diverse, complex realities behind some seemingly ordinary lives.
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(6.6MB)
Kate Fitzpatrick is no stranger to writing, having worked as a screenwriter, a journalist and a political speechwriter. That's on top of her long career as an actress in plays running the gamut from The Lady of the Camellias to The Rocky Horror Show. Then there's the numerous film and TV roles—most recently in Neighbours and Packed to the Rafters—and a stint as a London florist. Along the way she's been something of a celebrity and has enjoyed friendships with many well-known personalities. Name Dropping is a memoir of a life that has been lived to the full.
Friday 28 November 2008
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In 1926 Chicago had an unfortunate reputation for organised crime, political mayhem and industrial squalor but there was also gusto, glamour and jazz. The Chicagoan, a magazine to rival the successful New Yorker, appeared on newsstands for nine years until it died quietly in 1935 with the arrival of the Great Depression. The Chicagoan was largely forgotten until cultural historian Neil Harris stumbled upon it in the library of the University of Chicago some 20 years ago. He has now brought this publication back to life with a 400-page tribute The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.
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(11.1MB)
Recently The Law Report's Damien Carrick moderated a conversation with two authors of true crime books, Helen Garner and Kara Lawrence. Helen Garner is well known for both fiction and non-fiction. Her latest novel is The Spare Room, but in this discussion she revisits her 2004 non-fiction book Joe Cinque's Consolation. Kara Lawrence is a crime writer with The Daily Telegraph. The event was part of the National Investigations Conference, a gathering of professional investigators who work for various police forces, anti-corruption watchdogs and ombudsmen's offices.
David is on the trail of a special gift for his boyfriend Hugh. But once it is in their apartment, it's David who seems to be most in its thrall.
For copyright reasons this reading is not available a podcast or as audio on demand.
Thursday 27 November 2008
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Louis Nowra, novelist, playwright, essayist and screenwriter, has a new book out. It's a novel called Ice, a meditation on the many forms of ice: frozen water, ice the drug, ice as death, ice as preservation. It starts with a huge iceberg being towed into Sydney Harbour in the second half of the 19th century.
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(4.8MB)
It's just over 60 years since India became independent. In her book Holy Warriors: a Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism journalist Edna Fernandes reviews those years and paints a contemporary portrait of the country from its fundamentalist fringes. She begins by looking at Islam, revisits the Catholic Inquisition in Goa, meets Christian Baptist separatists and looks into both Sikh separatism and Hindu nationalism. Tim Parks investigates how much we can learn about India from this book.
At his rural retreat in the French countryside, David gets up close and personal with some of the local avian life.
For copyright reasons this reading is not available as a podcast or as audio on demand.
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