In her opening address at the 2008 Melbourne Writers' Festival Germaine Greer spoke about rage, which is also the subject of her recently published essay - On Rage.
Please note that this broadcast is not available as a podcast.
Listen Now - 28082008 | Download Audio - 28082008
In a program broadcast live from the Melbourne Writers' Festival, Peter Mares discusses Hitler, Stalin, evil and the writing of history with Professors Michael Burleigh and Orlando Figes. Michael Burleigh has written extensively about Germany in the 1930s and 40s. His book The Third Reich: A New History won the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. His most recent work is the controversial and very topical Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Modern Terrorism. Orlando Figes specialises in Russian history and his books include the award-winning A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924. His latest book is The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia.
Listen Now - 27082008 | Download Audio - 27082008
The judges for the world's richest short story prize, the Frank O'Connor Award, thought Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection Unaccustomed Earth was so good they didn't bother making a shortlist -- they just gave her the prize outright.
New Zealand writer Emily Perkins's book Novel About My Wife is set in London, where the author lived for 10 years.
Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco has 30 000 books in his Milan appartment and another 20 000 volumes in his country manor.
Listen Now - 26082008 | Download Audio - 26082008
Augusten Burroughs made the terrible events of his adolesence funny in Running with Scissors. Now Burroughs has written another memoir, one that goes further back into his childhood to investigate his relationship with his father. It's a darker work called A Wolf at the Table.
Listen Now - 25082008 | Download Audio - 25082008
Barry Maitland is known for his forensic police procedurals featuring the investigative pair of Detective Chief Inspector David Brock and Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla of Scotland Yard's Serious Crime Unit, but his latest work breaks the mould. The novel, called Bright Air, is set in Australia and, unlike his other work, it's written in the first person, making it a more personal and interior narrative that explores psychological conflicts along with investigating the crime.
Listen Now - 22082008 | Download Audio - 22082008
There's currently a major emphasis on getting children to read, engaging them in the written word through initiatives like Premier's reading challenges and Children's Book Week. Most of us who read for pleasure can name books and stories we loved when we were young, books that helped to shape our sense of identity and our sense of place, books that opened our minds to alternative worlds and new possibilities. Award-winning writer Sonya Hartnett, children's literature specialist Professor John Stephens and illustrator and author Tina Matthews discuss writing for children.
Listen Now - 21082008 | Download Audio - 21082008
Peter Stothard discusses three histories of women in the ancient world, a new edition of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, published fifty years after the first book Justine appeared, and the collected letters of writer Penelope Fitzgerald, who was in her sixties before her first book was published and who went on to win a Booker prize.
For every style of jazz, whether it's trad, cool, be-bop or acid, there are probably as many literary responses to the music.
Edinburgh and Melbourne might be on opposite sides of the world, but the two cities have a few things in common—both have famous comedy festivals, for example, and both have international writers festivals held in August. Now the two cities have another link. Edinburgh became the first UNESCO City of Literature in 2004. Melbourne has just become the second.
Listen Now - 20082008 | Download Audio - 20082008
Self-deprecating writer David Sedaris was 'humorist of the year' in 2001 after his book Me Talk Pretty One Day received rave reviews. Sedaris has written six mostly autobiographical works. His latest is When You Are Engulfed in Flames. He is doing a tour of Australia and is a guest at this year's Melbourne Writers' Festival.
Proving that there might be some truth in the cliche that any publicity is good publicity, the PR material attached to James Frey's new work Bright Shiny Morning boldly claims that NOTHING IN THIS BOOK SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ACCURATE OR RELIABLE. That's a direct quote -- both from the first page of the book and the postcard that came with the review copy.
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This year's Sydney Jewish Writers' Festival has attracted a number of prominent international guests, including leading US writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn. Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of three books, including The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million in which he investigates the story of what happened to his family during World War Two. He is also a professor of humanities at Bard College and a leading critic, writing regularly for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review.
American entrepreneur and publisher Barney Rosset mounted landmark, and ultimately successful, legal battles for free speech over the right to publish an uncensored version of Lady Chatterley's Lover and over Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer. He introduced Americans to writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Harold Pinter and published many of the writers of the Beat generation, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Filmmakers Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor have recorded the achievements of this passionate, and at times infamous, crusader for free expression in their documentary Obscene.
Listen Now - 18082008 | Download Audio - 18082008
Western Australian writer Amanda Curtin's new novel The Sinkings deals with the 19th century murder of an ex-convict called Little Jock, who had lived his life as a man, but was found in death to have been a woman. Amanda Curtin uses this story to traverse some difficult territory, exploring the experience of being neither man nor woman, of being born of indeterminate gender and what that might mean, not just for a child, but also for a mother.
If you go to Port Arthur in Tasmania there's a display of photos at the entrance that have been sent in by visitors to the prison. These are strange images that are hard to explain -- like a shadow where none should be -- is it a trick of the light, or a ghost captured on film?
