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Books - Authors - 2007

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Richard Ford: Edinburgh International Book Festival   Read Transcript

31/12/2007
Most people think writing is about characters and what they do, but American novelist Richard Ford thinks it's about making experiments with language. Furthermore, as a dyslexic person who didn't read a book to the end till he was 18, finding the right places for the words in his novels is a big clerical nightmare.

Michael Ondaatje on Divisadero   Read Transcript

27/12/2007
Recorded at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, speaks to Ramona Koval about his remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time, Divisadero. Divisadero begins in the 1970s on a ranch in northern California, where Coop, Claire and the narrator – who, as the story opens, tells us she has stopped calling herself Anna – are divided by an act of violence. Anna's mother died giving birth to her. Claire was also orphaned at birth and was left without a family, so Anna's father took both babies home from the hospital and raised them as sisters. Coop is five years older. His parents, who owned the next farm, were murdered by their own hired hand when he was four. Michael Ondaatje begins with a reading from Divisadero.

Creative commons: a challenge for creatives?

25/12/2007
Since the 19th century copyright has served to protect the rights of authors. But has this protection become a hindrance to creativity? Supporters of creative commons licenses say the pendulum has swung too far towards protectionism, and that this is affecting our creative culture. Creative commons is an alternative copyright regime that can allow people to copy other people's work for free -- as long as it's not-for-profit. Cory Doctorow has written articles for The Guardian on copy culture. He is passionate about the future of copyright and says a more democratic approach would be better for writers. Cory Doctorow is also a science fiction writer. His latest work is a collection of short stories called Overclocked, which he's published as a book, but it's also available for free on the web under a creative commons license. For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Cory Doctorow about why he embraced creative commons.

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David Malouf's Typewriter Music   Read Transcript

25/12/2007
David Malouf brought out his latest collection of poems, Typewriter Music in 2007. It happens to be the first collection of Malouf poems in 26 years. David Malouf describes Typewriter Music as 'A collection of poems written during 10 years or more. Some of them were written in Italy, others were written in Sydney and have echoes in earlier poems, or in novels or stories; or they spring from the same interest in words and music that produced the librettos.' David Malouf speaks to The Book Show's Ramona Koval.

Bird watching with Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson   Read Transcript

24/12/2007
Today, Ramona Koval presents an event from the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, with Canadian husband-and-wife team Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, who are both authors and both avid bird-watchers. They speak of their wonder and intense involvement with the life of birds, and with birds' relationships to humans. One of the most exquisite books to appear on our shelves in recent times has been a lovingly crafted collection of stories and images, poems and observations, myths and science; all gathered together as The bedside book of cirds: an avian miscellany with introductions to each chapter by Graeme Gibson. Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson have been named joint honorary president of the Rare Bird Division of BirdLife international – an appointment which caused Margaret to describe them as 'the William and Mary of Orange of Birding'.

Imagining the literary future and the year in review

21/12/2007
Today we reflect on the literary year that's been and speculate on what 2008 may bring in publishing and literary life. Domestically, Australia has undergone a major political shift. We've swapped prime ministers and parties in government, but does that signal a shift in the nation's psyche, or is Kevin Rudd just John Howard lite? Will we see ourselves reflected in new ways in the work of authors, journalists, playwrights and screenwriters or can we expect more continuity than change? Internationally the world will be focussed on getting the United States to join the team on climate change -- while the US itself will be in election mode in 2008 -- and looking inward. Which voices will prick our collective conscience? Who will step forward to take the place of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya or Turkish newspaper editor Hrant Dink? To discuss these and other issues the Book Show is joined by some fine literary thinkers: Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books; Henry Rosenbloom, head of Melbourne based Scribe Publishing; and playwright, author and speechwriter Michael Gurr.

The world without us: a thought experiment with Alan Weisman   Read Transcript

20/12/2007
What would the world be like without us? Without people that is? How quickly would nature reassert control over our cities and farms -- buckling the bitumen and cracking the concrete? And what traces would humans leave behind? The visible ones might be stainless steel saucepans and aluminium dishwasher parts -- the invisible ones, much more deadly traces of plastics and heavy metals. Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us is a thought experiment. By turns uplifting, as it describes the incredible regenerative power of nature, and depressing as it tells of the long-term and often invisible damage we have inflicted on the planet, particularly over the past half century.

Taslima Nasreen: Bangladeshi writer in hiding in India   Read Transcript

19/12/2007
Writers are often credited with having a licence to write the things that some of us wouldn't dare utter in private, let alone in public. You might agree that that's a good thing -- that some writers have the courage to go where others fear to tread. But what if their ideas are deemed controversial, or offensive, and there are calls for a book to be changed? Should the writer back down? The Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen has found herself in just that dilemma. Taslima Nasreen is a poet and physician who describes herself a 'radical feminist'. Her work has sparked controversy across the subcontinent, and she's been the subject of numerous death threats. She's been in hiding in the Indian capital New Delhi since November when violent protests erupted over her autobiography, known as Split In Two in English. Muslim groups say the book is derogatory to Islam. And given her status as a guest in India, Nasreen's case has become a national, political issue. After some pressure, Nasreen has said she will withdraw some of the lines in the offending book. But should she? To tell us more about Taslima Nasreen, Professor Rukmini Bhaya Nair, the editor of the Indian literary review Biblio joins the Book Show from New Delhi.

Fictional ecology: environmental politics and fiction

18/12/2007
In November 2007, state governments in Victoria and New South Wales decided to lift their moratorium on genetically modified canola. The issue divides opinion like few others -- critics see GM crops as Frankenstein food with dangerous and unforseeable consequences. Supporters say genetically modified organisms will save the world, feed the starving and help us grow survive in a warming world with unreliable rainfall. How might fiction deal with the debate over the pros and cons of GM crops -- and similar environmental issues for that matter? The landscape is often cast in a major role in Australian novels, but what about the politics of our environment, could they feature more prominently -- as they have in the US and Britain? Or is that kind of fiction too laboured, too close to polemic? Are topics like GM canola and climate change better left to non-fiction?

Speaking up for silence: writing, silence and solitude

18/12/2007
In speaking up for silence, Aldous Huxley said in the 1940s that the volume of the world had been turned up and he blamed radio for this increase, but now we could say that the volume of the world has been turned up even louder with saturation advertising, mobile phones, internet, blackberries, ipods - the list goes on of all today's modern distractions. It's not surprising that it can be hard to gather your thoughts sometimes, and for writers, it seems even more crucial to be able to carve out time and space to be able to compose an argument for an essay or a character for a novel. Stuart Sim is so passionate about noise pollution that he's written a Manifesto for Silence. He says having quiet space is crucial to our literary culture, and to religious and philosophical thought. And he also looks at how the concept of silence has been used by writers to signify death, the unknowable and the unspeakable. Writers retreats can provide the perfect refuge for those who can't write in cafes or at home - they are reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's belief in the need for 'a room of one's own'. One that's been set up over the last couple of years is Glenfern house in Melbourne. It has fine artistic pedigree because it was formerly of the creative Boyd family and is now part of the National Trust. With the help of Iola Matthews it has been converted into a writers retreat, and now there's a new community of writers at the historic house including bird watcher Sean Dooley and literary fiction writer, Hilary Bonnie. For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange ponders the connection between writing, silence and solitude with a personal reverie about the need for quiet.

Singing and fishing in Matthew Condon's Trout Opera   Read Transcript

17/12/2007
Journalist and writer Matthew Condon's Trout Opera romps through 20th century Australia. It begins with a giant trout shuffling across a bridge and courses through the first world war and up to the time of the Olympics, when the charming main character, Wilfred Lampe, is made into an exhibit for the occasion, as 'Old Man From Snowy River'. This is a literary opera that tracks the darkness and light of the heart.

An extraordinary collection: the Macleay Collection of natural history

13/12/2007
What's worth collecting? What are the cultural, scientific, philosophical and aesthetic principles that determine why we preserve some objects and discard others? What do collections tell us about ourselves and our world? And how are collections best displayed? Museum is a handsome new book that focuses on one particular collection, the Macleay Collection of natural history, housed mainly at the University of Sydney. Museum combines a stunning photographic survey of the specimens -- most of which are insects -- with a history of the Macleay Collection. Photographer Robyn Stacey has captured the look and feel of the collection with the eye of a still-life painter. Robyn's images are combined with essays by Ashley Hay that tell an important Australian story. This is the second book collaboration between Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay -- their first book, in what seems to be becoming a series, was called Herbarium, and was about the National Herbarium of NSW.

Travels in the blogosphere -- blogging novelists

13/12/2007
Is blogging a way for authors to keep in touch with readers or just a distraction from that manuscript they're supposed to be finishing? Science fiction writer William Gibson gave up his blog, or web diary, because it needed too much of his time - it was a bottomless sink that took him away from 'proper' writing. On the other hand, Colby Buzzell - an American GI - was offered a book deal based on his online diary about life as a soldier in Iraq. Why do writers blog and what are benefits and drawbacks of life in the blogosphere?

The necessity of poetry with Barry Hill

12/12/2007
Food, water, shelter and clothing are the necessities of life but for Barry Hill, poetry should also be on the list. His fifth collection of poems is called Necessity and it riffs on politics, spirituality and nature. It reveals his influences including the romantic poet Shelley, the political theorist Gramsci, and the Nobel prize winning Polish-American poet Milosz. Barry Hill is an acclaimed writer in several genres, having won Premiers' Awards for poetry and non-fiction. Most recently Broken Song, his biography of Australian anthropologist TGH Strehlow, won a National Biography Award and the Tasman-Pacific Bicentenary History Prize. Barry Hill is Poetry Editor of The Australian, and lives in Queenscliff, Victoria, where he has been writing full-time for the last 30 years. His most recent books include The War Sonnets, by Picaro Press and Necessity: Poems 1996- 2006 by Soi3 Modern Poets. For the Book Show Alicia Sometimes spoke to Barry Hill in our Melbourne studio. He begins with a reading from his collection with a poem called Rumi's Dancing Shoes.

Mentorships for young writers -- Christos Tsiolkas with Jim Thomson   Read Transcript

10/12/2007
How do young writers negotiate the pitfalls and obstacles of writing their first book? To guide first time novelists through these challenges, Express Media set up a mentorship program that paired them with more experienced writers. Christos Tsiolkas has been a mentor for five years with Express Media and his latest partnership is with budding young writer Jim Thomson. The Book Show finds out how they negotiate this relationship and how different it is from the relationship between writer and editor.

A homage to Alice Munro from the Edinburgh International Book Festival

04/12/2007
At this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, the much-loved Scottish poet Liz Lockhead told a packed audience why she loves the work of Alice Munro. Alice Munro is widely considered one of the best living writers in the world. Her short stories are largely set in Canada's southwestern Ontario but Alice Munro's reach is international. And the Edinburgh International Book Festival paid special tribute to her this year with a series of events -- including one, hosted by fellow Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, that was attended by a host of other writers who love Munro's work -- writers like Ali Smith, Kate Atkinson, and Liz Lockhead herself. Here, Liz Lockhead celebrates the work of Alice Munro.

Sydney PEN Voices series -- Christos Tsiolkas on tolerance

30/11/2007
Today we bring you the third and final instalment from the Sydney PEN Voices series. PEN is the international association of writers devoted to freedom of expression, and one of the most fruitful and interesting projects undertaken this year by Sydney PEN has been to commission three very politically engaged writers to explore some of the thorny issues facing Australia today, in a series of public lectures. All of which we've brought to you here on The Book Show. As you may recall, Alexis Wright took on fear. Gideon Haigh tackled prejudice, and today, Christos Tsiolkas looks at tolerance. And after the lecture he expands on his ideas in conversation with the writer and journalist David Marr.

Kate Mosse slips through time in Sepulchre

29/11/2007
Following the global success of Labyrinth, which sold more than 1.5m copies, Kate Mosse talks to broadcaster Nicola Barranger in the UK about her new novel Sepulchre. Like Labyrinth, Kate's new book is what she calls a 'time slip' novel -- two parallel plots which are interlinked. Leonie and her brother Anatole leave Paris for medieval Carcassone in the early part of the 20th century. Once there Leonie stumbles across a ruined Visigoth sepulchre. Meanwhile in the 21st century Meridith, a young American, is researching a biography of the French composer Claude Debussy and also heads to the Aude Valley in search of her birth family. Given that she has moved between the UK and south-west France for the past 18 years, setting has been a big influence and inspiration on Kate Mosse's writing. She outlines the details of the plot of the new novel -- explaining that, like her previous novel, it is set in the present and the past; this time in modern day Paris and fin-de-siècle south-west France.

Jane Austen and comedy

29/11/2007
Jane Austen is read from Bath in England, where she spent her later life, to Australia, India and Japan. Perhaps what explains her near universal celebration is her wit. This week the international flavour of her comedy is being celebrated in Melbourne at La Trobe University at a Jane Austen and Comedy conference.

James Jauncey's Scottish dystopia -- The Witness

26/11/2007
James Jauncey imagines a brutal future of the Scottish highlands in his new novel for young adults, The Witness. The all-powerful Department has passed the One Acre Act, giving the government power to dispossess the owners of any plot of land larger than a single acre. Guerrilla warfare has broken out as landlords have joined with crofters and stalkers in a resistance movement. Eighteen-year-old John MacNeil witnesses a village massacre by Department troops. In its aftermath, he finds an abandoned child, Ninian, and is compelled by forces within and without to take him under his wing. It's fast-paced and violent and asks all kinds of moral questions, and James Jauncey joins the Book Show from a BBC studio in the heart of Edinburgh.

Mandy Sayer's The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

22/11/2007
Australian novelist Mandy Sayer's latest book, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, explores childhood innocence in a sordid and damaged adult world. Mandy Sayer was an Australian/Vogel Literary Award winner seventeen years ago - since the she's published eight books and was named one of Australia's best young novelists. Not so young anymor, Mandy Sayer is probably best known for her two critically acclaimed memoirs - Dreamtime Alice about her time as a street performer in New York and New Orleans - and Velocity where she recounts her often difficult and traumatic upbringing. For the Book Show Kyla Brettle spoke to Mandy Sayer and she begins with a reading from her book The Night Has a Thousand Eyes. And just a warning, there is strong language in the interview.

Nature's monsters and our imagination with David Quammen   Read Transcript

21/11/2007
A book about nature's monsters: the Romanian dictator Ceausescu used to hunt bears in the wild, but really he was killing bears that had been fattened and set up for him. We could ask, who was the real monster? and this is the sort of question David Quammen asks in his book Monster of God: the Man Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. David Quammen is a much honoured non-fiction writer. He was Rhodes scholar and has stacks of awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He wrote The Song of the Dodo that included sections on the biology and geography of Tasmania. David Quammen talks to Kirsten Garrett from his home in the wintery mountains of Montana about how this more recent book Monster of God came into being.

Literary drag -- Melbourne Writers' Festival

21/11/2007
Good writers are often praised for their ability to get inside the heads of their characters - to slip seamlessly and convincingly into the skin of another person. Paradoxically they're also noted for their distinctive authorial voices -- the sense of their unique selves and perspective on the world infused in their words. But can we really read the writer behind the text? At this year's Melbourne Writers Festival - Michael Robotham and Alexander McCall Smith - author of the much loved Number 1. Ladies' Detective Agency series - talk about writing in the voice of the opposite sex.

Sarah Hall's militant women -- The Carhullan Army

20/11/2007
In the tradition of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, Sarah Hall's latest novel The Carhullan Army is a dystopian novel about a separatist feminist settlement in training to liberate the cities and towns controlled by the ubiquitous 'Authority'. It is Sarah Hall's third novel and is set in the place where she grew up, in Cumbria. The story is narrated by a woman known only as Sister. She escaped from a township called Rith, where women are forcibly fitted with contraceptive units, and everyone works in menial jobs. There is perpetual war, floods and a fuel crisis. The perpetual boredom of this repressive life is crushing the narrator, and so she decides to escape to join a group of women who had set up an alternative colony 15 years ago in a remote part of the country -- it is called Carhullan. So, she leaves her husband and escapes from the town and must walk to the Carhullan settlement across the Cumbrian landscape. She is looking for a new life, but she doesn't receive a warm welcome from the women, who ambush her on her trek to their farm. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Sarah Hall, who was in the BBC's Carlisle studio. Sarah Hall begins with a reading from The Carhullan Army. The narrator has just been captured by the women from the Carhullan settlement and they've confiscated her rifle.

Inside the PR industry with Bob Burton

19/11/2007
Moving from fiction where, for the most part, you know you're not dealing with fact, to the world of 'spin', where it can be very hard to know who is telling the whole truth about anything. There's fake TV news, carefully crafted media messages, and more and more stuff on the world wide web where you wouldn't know who's saying what. Canberra journalist Bob Burton has written Inside Spin: The Dark Underbelly of the PR Industry. Kirsten Garrett asks him when it all started.

Ian Rankin's Exit Music   Read Transcript

15/11/2007
The last days before a detective retires pop up as a plot device in many a crime novel. In Ian Rankin's Exit Music it has double significance, because this is the end of his Rebus series. Ramona Koval finds out if it was painful for Ian Rankin to put down the pen when he finished this book.

Chris Sheedy and Jenny Bond on the stories behind the world's favourite books

14/11/2007
What influenced writers like Jane Austen and Peter Carey to take up the pen? Chris Sheedy and Jenny Bond reveal the stories behind the stories in Behind the bestsellers: the stories behind the world's favourite books.

City Stories: Melburnalia

14/11/2007
You get the feeling sometimes that New York city is more often a character in literature, film and theatre than Melbourne, or Brisbane or Darwin. So, in the first of our City Stories series we're looking at a project in Melbourne by White Whale Theatre that puts place and setting at the heart of its production. Five Melbourne writers penned five unique plays set in the suburbs of Melbourne. The result is a play called Melburnalia. For The Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange wanders down the laneways of Ringwood, Footscray, St Kilda, the CBD and Kew with the writers. And just a warning, there is strong language in this piece.

Inga Clendinnen on the impossibility of biography   Read Transcript

09/11/2007
Virginia Woolf loved reading autobiography, but said biography itself was impossible. So, can life stories be told? It's a question that Inga Clendinnen, the writer and historian, faced when she was asked to give this year's National Biography Award Lecture. Inga Clendinnen has been praised around the world for her work on Aztec and Mayan cultures, and her book, Reading the Holocaust, received many awards, including being named as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times in 1999. The following year, Inga Clendinnen published her own memoir, Tiger's Eye, but it's something that she looks back on with mixed emotions. She recently gave her lecture, on the impossibility of biography, in Sydney and a week later, in Melbourne. It was the fifth ever National Biography Award Lecture, an annual lecture tied to the National Biography Award, which was established in 1996 to encourage the highest standards of writing in biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in the genre. And this year, the award went to Jacob G Rosenberg for East of Time, set in Poland during Rosenberg's own childhood. Here is Inga Clendinnen giving the 2007 National Biography Award Lecture on Virginia Woolf's declaration of the impossibility of biography.

Mystery solved: Edgar Allan Poe's death

08/11/2007
Matthew Pearl, author of The Poe Shadow, thinks he has solved the puzzle of what caused Edgar Allan Poe's death. Poe died in 1849 in Baltimore, but the cause of death is unknown. Suicide, alcohol, tuberculosis, heart disease, and even rabies are some of the possibilities that have been put forward. Now the mystery has apparently been solved; and it's been done by the clever mind of a writer, rather than a scientist. It is apt that while Matthew Pearl was knee deep in research for his own book about Poe's death, he uncovered this mystery. Matthew Pearl joins the Book Show from a studio in Boston; and that is quite fitting, because Poe was born there.

Michelle de Kretser: The Lost Dog   Read Transcript

06/11/2007
Michelle de Kretser talks to Robert Dessaix for The Book Show about her new novel, The Lost Dog.

Inky Awards - teen choice for young adult fiction

30/10/2007
We all know of the Booker prize, the Pulitzer prize, the Miles Franklin award but now there's the Inky awards. These are the only Australian awards for young adult fiction whose judges are the teenagers who read them. Young adult fiction may not always get a lot of attention in literary circles, but this award is raising its profile. It's also raising the profile of the readers who are able to connect with the characters in the fiction, like in Simmone Howell's Notes from the Teenage Underground, which made it on to the short list of the Inky awards. The Inky Awards is run by the State Library of Victoria's Centre for Youth Literature and Insideadog.com.au, where the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to the organisers and some of the younger judges of the awards.

The history of virginity with Hanne Blank   Read Transcript

22/10/2007
How do you define virginity? According to historian Hanne Blank, it's not as straightforward as you'd think. St Thomas Aquinas said that to be a virgin you had to be pure of body and mind. In Ancient Greek times the 'parthenios' were considered virgins and yet they often had children; and during the Renaissance the 'piss prophets' would study the urine of young women to test their virginity. It's the history of virginity on the Book Show -- it's not as simple as the birds and the bees.

Emma Magenta's The Origin of Lament

17/10/2007
Not all books that look like they're for children are for children, as the Book Show's Kyla Brettle discovers after reading about the fraught adventures of Magenta in The Origin of Lament. Kyla Brettle talks to Magenta's creator, Emma Magenta.

Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin

16/10/2007
Ceridwen Dovey writes with surgical efficiency about complicity as the blight of our times. Her debut novel Blood Kin is set in a timeless, placeless land that's experienced the overthrow of a despot. She explores the complicity of ordinary people to the excesses of the powerful through her three main characters: the president's portraitist, barber and chef.

Doris Lessing - Nobel prize winner 2007   Read Transcript

12/10/2007
Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel prize for literature by the Swedish Academy. Today we're bringing you a conversation Ramona Koval had with her in Edinburgh in 1999 when she'd just published the novel Mara and Dan.

Writing for Second Life: Richard James Allen

10/10/2007
How is writing for Second Life different from writing a book, a play or even a film? Today we crawl into the future to find out about writing stories for virtual worlds. Poet Richard James Allen has adaptated his work Thursday's Fictions for Second Life -- it's already been a book of poetry, a film and a theatre work. The adaptation was collaborative process and he worked with Jackie Turnure from LAMP (Laboratory of Advanced Media Production) to transform his writing for this virtual world. It's part of the Story of the Future project run by the Australia Council which explores new ways for writers to ply their trade across platforms from games to mobile phones. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke first to Richard James Allen when he was in Melbourne recently and asked him to describe the story, Thursday's Fictions.

Amy Bloom's Away   Read Transcript

09/10/2007
Away is a novel from celebrated American writer Amy Bloom. It covers nearly 2 years in the life of a larger than life character Lillian Leyb. (leyb means lion in Yiddish) and she is certainly a lion-hearted woman in the strong and descriptive language of Amy Bloom, whose short stories have been published in Antaeus, The New Yorker amongst other publications and her work has been anthologized in numerous collections, including the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards. She teaches creative writing at Yale but she's also worked as a psychotherapist and is the author of a non-fiction work called Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude. But back to the novel - Away - Lillian Leyb is a Jewish immigrant from Russia who has fled her home after her husband, parents and neighbours were murdered in a pogrom. She has been separated from her two-year-old daughter, Sophie, and she is attempting to start a new life for herself on the Lower East Side in New York. Desperation makes her know what she wants and she can see how to get it. This involves becoming the lover of Reuben, the owner of the Yiddish Theatre and of his handsome more or less gay actor son Meyer. Amy Bloom joins Ramona Koval from her home in the USA.

Getting a handle on Henry: Henry Handel Richardson

08/10/2007
Henry Handel Richardson is one of the greats of early 20th century Australian literature. She wrote The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and The Getting of Wisdom as well as music, poems and short stories. After 13 years and 12 volumes the largest research project ever undertaken on an Australian author has just finished. Henry Handel Richardson's work has been reassessed in this Monash University project.

Book to movie adaptations

05/10/2007
It is, of course, stating the completely obvious that many of the films we see on the big screen have their origins in places other than a film studio. Some screenplays have their seeds in familiar oral traditions, myths, fairy stories, historical tales and even computer games. Very often though, these stories have been adapted from the pages of books. But a book is NOT a screenplay and the fact that a story reads well on the page doesn't automatically mean it will translate to a coherent visual form on the screen. So are there easy ways to determine whether a good book will be a good basis for a film? So today on The Book Show, Ramona Koval speaks to film-maker Bruce Beresford and to Dr Simone Murray, who's devoted a great deal of time to research the relationship between these two forms. Plus we hear from author Thomas Keneally, whose novel Schindler's Ark was adopted by Steven Spielberg and adapted to the screen, resulting in the remarkably successful film Schindler's List, an experience that seems to be a very rare moment for a writer. Since that time, Tom Keneally has pondered this relationship between book and film. And although Schindler's List was the result of chance events, which he describes as being much like a lightening strike, Tom feels that it is possible to create an environment where book publishers and film producers can share ideas about writing that has screen potential.

Anita Rau Badami's Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

02/10/2007
The history of 20th century India reads like a tragedy. From the time of partition to the explosion of the Air India Flight in 1984, Anita Rau Badami connects the lives of women to this tragedy in her new book Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Her characters' hopes for the future are defeated by the wheels of history.

Richard Ford: Edinburgh International Book Festival   Read Transcript

01/10/2007
Most people think writing is about characters and what they do, but American novelist Richard Ford thinks it's about making experiments with language. Furthermore, as a dyslexic person who didn't read a book to the end till he was 18, finding the right places for the words in his novels is a big clerical nightmare.

Simon Sebag Montefiore on The Young Stalin

28/09/2007
Joseph Stalin may have been a man of steel, a force behind the Russian Revolution, a founding father of the communist party and head of the superpower Soviet Union until his death in 1953. But he was also part punk gangster, part poet, intellectual, charismatic visionary and orchestrator of some of the worst human rights violations in modern history. Stalin's personal journey from studying the priesthood to despot is brought to life in a new biography by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. At the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival, Simon Sebag Montefiore talks about his most recent book, The Young Stalin, and unfolds one of the events that established Stalin as one of Lenin's key henchmen -- the most famous robbery of the early 20th century. Stalin was the man behind it all.

AL Kennedy on her novel Day

26/09/2007
From this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ramona Koval speaks with writer and stand-up comedian AL Kennedy about her new novel Day. Day is the story of Alfred Day, a Second World War veteran who becomes an extra in a war film. On the film set, Day has flashbacks of his time as a prisoner of war -- and through this tells the story of his life. AL Kennedy was inspired to write Day after reading a Picture Post article about the making of the war film The Wooden Horse, in which actual former POWs play POWs on the screen.

Creative commons: a challenge for creatives?

25/09/2007
Since the 19th century copyright has served to protect the rights of authors. But has this protection become a hindrance to creativity? Supporters of creative commons licenses say the pendulum has swung too far towards protectionism, and that this is affecting our creative culture. Creative commons is an alternative copyright regime that can allow people to copy other people's work for free -- as long as it's not-for-profit. Cory Doctorow has written articles for The Guardian on copy culture. He is passionate about the future of copyright and says a more democratic approach would be better for writers. Cory Doctorow is also a science fiction writer. His latest work is a collection of short stories called Overclocked, which he's published as a book, but it's also available for free on the web under a creative commons license. For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Cory Doctorow about why he embraced creative commons.

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Legal control of book covers ... the fate of Judith Wright's property

25/09/2007
An interesting issue arose recently, one that's not uncommon, where the release of a book was challenged, not because of the writing, but because of the image on the cover. The book, which was a fairly benign work about Australian cricket, had among its photos on the front cover one of the Captain of the Australian Men's Cricket team, Ricky Ponting. Ricky's management were challenging the use of the photo, not because Ricky owned the rights to the image, but because it was suggested this was a misuse of an image, implying the cricketer's endorsement of the book. This has become a common bluff by celebrities and celebrity management folk who wish to exert unreasonable control over the way their clients are portrayed in the media. But if they're not the copyright holders, do they have any valid argument? And in a completely different subject that we can only touch upon here today, but which we'll follow up in greater detail later -- the fate of the home of one of our most iconic poets and writers, the late Judith Wright, is reported to be hanging in the balance at the moment. Judith gave her property to the Australian National University to be used for ecological research, specifying on the Deed of Trust that the property not be sold before 2014 unless there was a necessity to do so. However, before she died, Judith grudgingly agreed to the ANU selling the property to the Duke of Edinburgh Trust -- for $1. Now the Duke of Edinburgh Trust is trying to sell the property after they unsuccessfully attempted to subdivide the land. And, of course, the Trust stands to make a very large sum of money for their $1 investment. Many people are alarmed by this, and by the fact that there has never been a Heritage assessment of the property. You would imagine that there are some serious legal impediments for people wanting to dispose of a major bequest like this. But how binding is a Deed of Trust? Our legal pundit Nic Pullen is a lawyer and partner with TressCox, specialising in publishing and the media, and he joins Ramona Koval to discuss these issues.

A comic Great Gatsby? Nicki Greenberg's graphic adaptation of this classic

24/09/2007
Comic books are often associated with iron-jawed superheroes or the scruffy troublemaker Ginger Meggs -- or The Phantom brooding in his jungle cave. Not many people would think of F Scott Fitzgerald's classic, The Great Gatsby, but Melbourne comic book artist Nicki Greenberg did. She's taken almost seven years to adapt one of the 20th century's best-loved books. For The Book Show George Dunford spoke to Nicki Greenberg in Melbourne.

Claire Tomalin on Thomas Hardy: Edinburgh International Book Festival

21/09/2007
We're familiar with those lusty rural dramas served up like warm cider on Sunday night telly: fields and tumbles in haystacks, women defying social conventions, belligerent old men with handlebar moustaches, and stern young men with political passions. Hardy's novels have been favourites for morphing into movies or teledramas. But he was also one of the most prolific English poets of the early 20th century, writing almost 1,000 poems, either tributes to his first wife Emma or romantic nature poems with an edge. Today we bring you biographer Claire Tomalin, as she discusses her new exploration of Hardy's life and his poetry. The talk was recorded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Claire's highly acclaimed biographies include Mary Wolstonecraft, a book on Shelley and his world, on Kathryn Mansfield; The Invisible Woman, the story of Mary Turnin and Charles Dickens (which won a few awards including the NCR Book Award), and Samuel Pepys: The Unequal Self, which was named Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002. She has also written on Jane Austen.

Patrick Gale: Brisbane Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

20/09/2007
British author Patrick Gale's latest novel is Notes from an Exhibition. Set in Gale's home county of Cornwall, it tells of a family headed by a woman who is both successful artist and manic depressive mother; roles that are hard to separate. Each chapter of the book begins with a note from the exhibition of the work and life of an artist called Rachel Kelly. She's a painter, a mother of four -- in fact a very bad mother of four; she has bi-polar illness, and is a gifted and tormented artist with an extremely loving and forgiving husband. Patrick Gale shows her in all her facets. From the Brisbane Writers' Festival Patrick Gale began with a reading from Notes from an Exhibition.

Armistead Maupin: Brisbane Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

18/09/2007
San Francisco writer and gay activist Armistead Maupin, author of the best-selling series Tales of The City, in conversation with Ramona Koval at the Brisbane Writers' Festival about his most recent book, Michael Tolliver Lives. After 18 years, Maupin has returned to Barbary Lane in this new book which is another love song to Maupin's adopted home. Tolliver was of course the beloved hero of the Tales of The City series, a man who has been living with AIDS for a long time now. The book begins with Michael being greeted by a man he passes in the street who says 'You're supposed to be dead'. So Michael Tolliver has survived with AIDS into his late fifties, and has even fallen in love and married his much younger husband Ben. Here, from the Brisbane Writers' Festival last Sunday afternoon is Armistead Maupin. And a warning: there's sexually explicit language and adult themes in what you're about to hear.

Chris Womersley's The Low Road

17/09/2007
The Low Road is a crime thriller without the detective. It's the debut novel of journalist Chris Womersley and has been described as a book about the kinship of criminals. It follows the journey of three criminals looking for a way out of their current lifestyles. There's Lee, who has annoyed a clique in the criminal underworld and has run off with $8000 of theirs: they're coming to get him, or at least the washed-up Josef is coming for him. Then there's the character Wild, whose life has been spiralling out of control -- he grudgingly takes Lee under his wing and they go on a journey together to find solace for Wild and to get the bullet out of Lee's rib-cage. It's a noir thriller that veers into gothic territory. Chris Womersley speaks to the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange about The Low Road and begins with a reading.

Malcolm Knox 's Jamaica   Read Transcript

13/09/2007
Australian writer and journalist Malcolm Knox discusses his latest novel Jamaica with Radio National's Peter Mares. It's a darkly comic tale of male friendship and betrayal that follows a team of six rich, 40-something friends on a trip to Jamaica to compete in a dangerous ocean swimming race. It's a story shaped by class and money and fuelled by alcohol and sex -- or at least the preoccupation with sex -- all territory familiar from Knox's previous two novels Summerland and A Private Man.

Jon Ronson: Edinburgh International Book Festival

12/09/2007
Journalist, writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson has written several funny books about the world of conspiracy theorists. In Them: Adventures with Extremists and The men who stare at goats, he takes us around jihad training camps, to Ku Klux Klan meetings, and inside American militia groups. Out of the Ordinary is his new book; a collection of pieces from The Guardian charting the rise of more domestic madnesses.

John Lanchester's Family Romance

11/09/2007
In his new book Family Romance, John Lanchester pieces together his parents' histories, their secrets, the shape of their shared life and how their actions and omissions made him who he is. It tells the story of the family; from his father's devastating wartime separation from his parents during the occupation of Hong Kong to his mother's decision to become a nun and then, after 15 years, quit the convent, change her name, take her sister's identity, and conceal these facts from her husband and son for 40 years.

Nature writing and earthquakes with Dael Allison

11/09/2007
Nature writing is about land, place and environment. Britian has the romantic pastoral tradition, and of course there's Henry David Thoreau in the United States. In Australia, the lyrical tradition of Kendall and Patterson is prominent, but Dael Allison's approach is more political. Dael Allison won this year's Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize for her piece called Polyp written about the coral reefs affected by an earthquake in Nias, Indonesia in 2005 after she spent eight months there volunteering for the United Nations. Polyp appears in the Winter edition of Island, Tasmania's literary magazine.

Fay Weldon: Edinburgh International Book Festival

06/09/2007
Since Fay Weldon's Down Among the Women, written in the 1970s, she has written about subjects from cloning to cuckolding. Her new novel is, in a sense, again 'down among the women', but this time the women are high achievers -- mortgage brokers, judges, journalists even. In The Spa Decameron, ten women meet at a spa over Christmas and New Year and indulge in ten days of pampering and talking together.

Graham Swift: Edinburgh International Book Festival

05/09/2007
Booker prize-winner Graham Swift, who explores the nature of families and blood ties in his latest novel, Tomorrow, in conversation with Ramona Koval at the 2007 Edinburgh International Book Festival. Tomorrow is set in a single night, the night before a couple is to tell their twin 16-year-old children a secret of their birth. It is a story of a marriage and the delicate matter of cherishing happiness.

Pat Barker: Edinburgh International Book Festival   Read Transcript

04/09/2007
Booker prize winning writer Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy made her famous for her moving portrayal of shell shock victims in the First World War, returns to that battle front in her latest book. Life Class looks at a group of artists at the famous Slade art school and the debates around what are fitting subjects to be portrayed in art -- is it the beauty or the reality of life?

Colin Thubron: Edinburgh International Book Festival   Read Transcript

03/09/2007
In the first of a series of interviews from the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ramona Koval talks with eminent travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron about his book, Shadow of the Silk Road. The Silk Road is not a single path so much as a network of trade routes that criss-crossed Asia from China to the Mediterranean. In his travels along the Silk Road, Colin Thubron discusses many things: from what he packs in his bag to questions about identity.

Dave Eggers: novelist, social activist and pirate supply store owner

31/08/2007
Dave Eggers is something of a phenomenon. In fact he was described in the London Observer as the Michael Jordon of American literature. He first shot to fame seven years ago, when his memoir, A Heart-breaking Work of Staggering Genius, became a surprising number one best seller. Since then, he has established his own publishing company McSweeneys, which publishes a literary journal open to all writers -- that sells like hotcakes and attracts the biggest names in literature today. Names like Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith and Pulitzer prize winner Michael Chabon. He has also written a number of books -- What is the What being the latest. Dave Eggers speaks at the Melbourne Writers' Festival to writer and broadcaster Tony Wilson -- and an apology, the sound quality of lapel mics in old town halls is never as good as we'd like it to be...

Young writers in Australia: from grunge literature to DIY publishing

31/08/2007
In the 90s there was a surge of under 35s being published, much of their work being critically acclaimed. But fast forward to 2007, and submissions to publishers appear to have dropped considerably. Have they discovered DIY on the internet perhaps, or have they just lost interest in what is still a baby-boomer dominated literary landscape? Young writers can certainly make an splash. Take a look overseas: think of Zadie Smith who published White Teeth at 25 and won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2000. 26-year-old novelist Jonathan Saffron Foer's first book Everything is Illuminated has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And then there's Granta -- it's dedicated whole editions to the work of young American and British writers. To be a 'Granta Young Writer' has cultural kudos. But what about in Australia? Do we encourage young writers enough?

David Leavitt on Alan Turing   Read Transcript

30/08/2007
Champion of artificial intelligence and the mathematical mind behind the Allies' victory in World War II, Alan Turing was crippled by treatment that was meant to 'cure' him of homosexuality. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, David Leavitt sensitively portrays this tragedy, which led to Turing's suicide.

Ewan Morrison's The Last Book You Read and Other Stories   Read Transcript

29/08/2007
In Australia for the Age Melbourne Writers' Festival, Ewan Morrison speaks to the Book Show about his collection of streetwise short stories. The Last Book You Read and Other Stories captures the desires of men and women who are gay, straight, young and old.

Kirsty Murray talks about her Asialink writer's residency

27/08/2007
'Write about what you know' is good advice for any writer, and it's easy to follow if you're writing about contemporary life in your own home town. But what about historical fiction set in another country? Kirsty Murray writes historical fiction for young people and her characters come from other cultures and other times - like India in 1910, for instance, where an Australian children's theatre troupe went on strike in the middle of a tour, and sacked their manager. Kirsty Murray recently came back from a three-month Asialink writer's residency in India, where she was researching that story.

Indra Sinha's Animal's People

23/08/2007
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007, Indra Sinha's Animal's People is an explosive and energetic novel that takes the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India in 1984 as its starting point. The narrator 'Animal'—a victim of the disaster who doesn't accept pity—jumps off the page and talks to you!

Post Hurricane Katrina: writing about New Orleans   Read Transcript

23/08/2007
Michelle Rayner: The great playwright Tennessee Williams said of New Orleans that 'on my social passport, Bohemia is indelibly stamped, without regret on my part.' 'Bohemia' must have been a kind of a pseudonym for New Orleans. The father of southern high gothic, William Faulkner, was a resident of New Orleans when he wrote his first novel, and Williams Burroughs' New Orleans home under the Huey Long Bridge was immortalised by his pal Jack Kerouac in On the Road. The city of New Orleans has long fostered a thriving literary culture, but what happens when your computer is under water and your roof blows away in the wind? It disrupts not only daily life, but the creative process as well. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led to the forced exile of a whole swathe of writers from New Orleans. Two years on from the disaster, some writers have started to move back, they are starting to write again in that city, and particularly about their experience of Hurricane Katrina. For instance, the writer James Lee Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown, is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Jane Ciabattari is from the US National Book Critics Circle and she has been watching the slow re-establishment of the New Orleans literary community. She's a highly regarded journalist and writes and reviews for The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Andrew Hutchinson's Rohypnol

22/08/2007
In Andrew Hutchinson's debut novel Rohypnol, a gang of wealthy private school boys hit Melbourne's nightclubs, spiking the drinks of unsuspecting women before raping them. These monsters have money, are used to getting what they want and don't plan on answering to anyone. Rohypnol won the 2006 Victorian Premier's literary award for an unpublished manuscript by an emerging writer and is written in the tough and unflinching style of Loaded and Dead Europe, by Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas -- and it comes as little surprise to discover in the acknowledgements that Christos Tsiolkas was indeed Hutchinson's mentor on the book. Andrew Hutchinson is speaking today from Canberra to Rhiannon Brown.

Anita Heiss and Indigenous publishing

22/08/2007
Poet, chicklit writer, social commentator, and member of the Wirundjeri nation of central New South Wales, Anita Heiss talks about her new book of poetry I'm Not a Racist But... and reflects on the state of Indigenous publishing in Australia. She also wrote a book with children from La Perouse primary school in Sydney called Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon.

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, by Linda Colley   Read Transcript

21/08/2007
In The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, Linda Colley documents the life of British woman, Elizabth Marsh, who is conceived in Jamaica and born in Britain in 1735, to a British naval carpenter Milbourne Marsh, and a mother who may have been of mixed racial origin. Elizabeth Marsh's story depicts a kind of female Candide who, among her many real life escapades, is captured at sea by Morocco corsairs and lives to literally write a book about this experiences. She survives being bankrupted twice due to a feckless husband, and after giving birth to two children, spends her early middle age years traipsing around India with another man! Linda Colley, joins the Book Show from the BBC studios in Norwich.

Peter Behrens: The Law of Dreams

20/08/2007
Peter Behrens talks with Michelle Rayner about his first novel, The Law of Dreams, an epic odyssey set during the Irish Famine of 1847.

The anthropology of daily life

16/08/2007
Think about the things you do every day -- eating breakfast, commuting to work, going about your job, watching telly on the sofa. These routine activities might seem meaningless but our next guest, Joe Moran, says they're as significant to contemporary life as rituals are to tribal societies. He describes himself as an 'anthropologist of the everyday' and he looks at ordinary habits with fresh eyes to uncover their central role in our lives. Joe Moran is the author of Queuing for Beginners: the Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime, a book charting the changes to British routines since the 1930s. Joe Moran joined Radio National from the BBC's Liverpool studios and spoke to the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange, who asked him, 'why study everyday life?'

Australian literature in schools

15/08/2007
Are young people today reading Australian fiction? Last week the Australia Council hosted a round table in Canberra at which authors, publishers, teachers and academics discussed ways to reinvigorate Australian literature in education. Nick Jose was one of the participants at the round table and he joined The Book Show from our Adelaide studios.

Paddy O'Reilly's short stories

07/08/2007
Now to a collection of short stories about giant women, break-ups, Russian cross-dressers in Japan and lonely housewives. Paddy O'Reilly has been writing short stories for many years, but The End of the World is her first published collection. The stories are tragi-comic and have bold characters with a penchant for telling stories themselves. They've been described as adventurous, sharp-witted and beautifully crafted. For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Paddy O'Reilly in Melbourne and asked her what the common thread was that linked these short stories together.

From zines to books ... zinester Vanessa Berry goes hi-fi

02/08/2007
Zines don't really show up in the census, as far as publishing is concerned, but there's a thriving zine community in Australia, and today we meet one of its stars ... if the idea of celebrity in such a low-fi medium isn't too much of a contradiction. Vanessa Berry has been making zines since her teenage years. The quality of her writing caught the eye of a small publishing house based in Sydney, and she was persuaded to publish some of her best work in a book which has just been released by Local Consumption Publications.

Robert Dessaix

01/08/2007
At Byron Bay Writers' Festival Ramona Koval compares notes with writer, broadcaster and translater Robert Dessaix on the topic of books, the literary life and the experience of being on the radio. Robert's stellar career as a writer really took flight with his autobiography A Mother's Disgrace. This led to his novels Night Letters, Corfu and Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev. But for 10 years, Robert Dessaix was the presenter of the ABC Radio National program Books & Writing. When he left to be a writer full time, Ramona Koval stepped into that role for the following 11 years, until the beginning of 2006 when Books & Writing morphed into this daily program, The Book Show. And so that's why Ramona and Robert got together in Byron Bay, to talk about books on the radio.

Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist   Read Transcript

31/07/2007
From the Byron Bay Writers Festival, Ramona Koval speaks to novelist, essayist, screenwriter and director Richard Flanagan about his most recent novel The Unknown Terrorist, about the gruelling experience of a German book tour, and about what made him a writer -- including his extraordinary experiences in the Tasmanian public service, and why he left it.

Imagining the Arctic and Antarctic   Read Transcript

26/07/2007
The polar regions have been in the news a lot lately, be it in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, or with images of polar bears perched on melting icebergs -- it's also International Polar Year. There is something very romantic about the poles, isn't there? They occupy a special place in our imaginations. Antarctica is described as the only true wilderness and is the coldest, driest and windiest place on earth, the Arctic on the other hand has a complex human history from the Saami to the Inuit, but because of the threat of global warming their destinies -- and ours -- are linked. So, this morning we are joined by three eminent polar writers: a naturalist, historian and archaeologist who have all been either to the Arctic or Antarctic or both.

Science writing about the occult with Deborah Blum

19/07/2007
Mixing science and writing and the supernatural doesn't always make science fiction. In this case, Pulitzer prize winning science writer, Deborah Blum has written a factual book called Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life After Death. Deborah Blum won the Pulitzer Prize for science writing in 1992; she sits on boards of several international science writing organisations; and she is professor of Science Journalism at the University of Wisconsin and president elect of the National Association of Science Writers in America. Here, interviewed by Kirsten Garrett, Deborah Blum (in Wisconsin) sets out the background for the intense interest in the occult in Victorian Times - but notes that the idea of ghosts was around long before then.

John Berger's political way of seeing   Read Transcript

18/07/2007
John Berger is a novelist, storyteller, poet, screenwriter, and art critic. His 1972 BBC series and book Ways of Seeing made an enormous impact as a reaction to Kenneth Clark's series on art Civilisation. Now 80, his new book is Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance and it's a series of reflections written between 2001 and 2006, arising from contemporary political moments -- London in the aftermath of the July 7 bombings, New Orleans after its destruction by Hurricane Katrina, New York after 9/11, and the Middle Eastern troubles, from Bagdad to Gaza.

The poetry of JS Harry

16/07/2007
Jan Harry, or JS Harry as she is known, has been described by Peter Porter as 'the most arresting poet working in Australia today'. Her work clearly challanges the form, because other reviewers have said that reading one Harry poem 'is no guarantee that you will make sense of the next'. Born in South Australia, Jan Harry has lived in Sydney most of her life, and since her first book of poems was published in 1971 she has been given many awards, including the New South Wales Premier's 1996 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize for her selected poems. Her new book is called Not Finding Wittgenstein and it's a collection of Peter Henry Lepus poems. This Peter Rabbit is on a voyage of discovery, he is an explorer rabbit and also a reporter rabbit and is on a quest to meet and talk with some of the world's great philosophers, in an effort to perhaps understand the world of human beings.

Comic book appreciation

16/07/2007
Poet Dorothy Parker confessed to loving them, novelist John Updike was greatly influenced by them and EE Cummings said they were a 'living ideal' superior to 'mere reality'. And they were talking about comics! Comics are popular again and cultural theorists have turned their gaze to the world of good and evil and subversion that some comics represent. Like Jeet Heer, he is an Indian born Canadian and learned to speak English by reading comics. From that early interest he developed a lifelong passion for this type of storytelling and has written about it for the Boston Globe and the Literary Review of Canada. Jeet Heer's writing about comics is described as ingenious and imaginative and he joins us on the phone from Toronto.

Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books   Read Transcript

11/07/2007
A new novel from JM Coetzee is always a publishing event. An excerpt just published in the New York Review of Books of Diary of A Bad Year suggests that Coetzee is yet again playing with the bridge between fiction and non-fiction. Also we look at two new books which attempt to reveal the real Hillary Clinton... And we ask, what's behind the new surge of interest in the writing of the late Latin American writer Roberto Bolano? To discuss all this and more is the editor of the New York Review of Books and Book Show regular, Robert Silvers, speaking to Ramona Koval.

Jacob Rosenberg - Sunrise West   Read Transcript

09/07/2007
Last time Jacob Rosenberg was on The Book Show, it was only a few months ago on the occasion of his winning the National Biography Award 2007 for the first book of his memoirs, East of Time, which also won last year's NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Jacob Rosenberg has lived in Australia since 1948. He was born in Poland, the youngest member of a working-class Jewish family who lived in Lodz, a city known as the Polish Manchester because of its textile industry. With the German occupation of Poland, Jacob and his family were confined to the Lodz ghetto until they were sent to Auschwitz. Within a few days of arriving there, he was the only one of his family still alive. East of Time was a collection of stories of his childhood through to his early 20s. Now at almost 85 he's just published the next instalment of his memoirs; this time it's called Sunrise West. This book, as Jacob says in the preface, navigates between two worlds; his wartime and postwar experiences in Europe and his subsequent new life in Australia. He says that 'the hallmark of the first world is darkness and light: that of the second hope, and restoration -- but a restoration forever coloured by the past, which cunningly refuses to give up its claim and permeates my days.' And Jacob Rosenberg joins Ramona Koval on The Book Show.

Sonya Hartnett's The Ghost's Child

05/07/2007
Sonya Hartnett's new novel The Ghost's Child is an evocative, poetic and dreamy story about an old lady who is visited one day by a young boy; the child of a ghost and a ghostly child at the same time. And from there the story of the old lady evolves -- the story of her growth from a girl to a woman and the doomed love she has for a strange young man.

Bartholomew Roberts: King of the Caribbean   Read Transcript

02/07/2007
Pet parrots, excessive drinking, skull and cross-bone flags -- these are all things we associate with pirates but, did you know that in the 18th century when you became a pirate, you had to sign up to special pirate rules, or that there's a tradition of homosexuality within the ranks of pirating? Well, Bartholomew Roberts raided 400 boats in his short career as a pirate in the Atlantic from 1719-1722 but, unlike the classic image we have of pirates, he didn't drink, gamble or carouse with women. Richard Sanders is a pirate historian and he's written about this disciplinarian pirate in his book If A Pirate I Must Be: The True Story of Bartholomew Roberts, King of the Caribbean. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Richard Sanders about the allure of pirating for the common man.

An intimate relationship: editors and writers   Read Transcript

29/06/2007
Editors are like invisible menders. If they're good at what they do their tracks are invisible but without their contribution, the work would fray at the edges. So how is this invisible work done? What goes on between writers and editors? What are the politics and protocols of the editorial relationship? On the Book Show today we're joined by a writer/editor pair who have consented to reveal all! By hearing the perspective of both author and writer, hopefully we'll get some insight into what it's like to edit, and be edited. Judith Lukin-Amundsen is one of Australia's leading editors, she's worked with the likes of Tim Winton, Robert Dessaix, Delia Falconer, Rodney Hall and Charlotte Wood, who also joins us today. The two have collaborated on all three of Charlotte Wood's novels - one which is forthcoming in October: The Children. We're also joined by Jacquie Kent, an editor herself, and biographer of the late Beatrice Davis (1909-1992), the legendary editor at Angus and Robertson from 1937 to 1970 - the woman who practically invented the idea of the professional editor in Australia.

David Crystal's By Hook or By Crook

28/06/2007
Did you know that the survey of bird names done in Yorkshire in the 1950s found local words for starling from the coast to inland as diverse as: jibby - jippy - shippy - sheppy - shabby - cheppy? These tales and more are shared by one of the world's foremost experts on language, Professor David Crystal in his latest book By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to the English language over 10 years ago, and is the author of many books exploring the way we use words. By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English starts off as a search for English accents in Wales, and ends up almost everywhere else. David Crystal joins us from Hertfordshire, where he is on a book tour.

Gail Jones's novel Sorry

26/06/2007
Gail Jones's latest novel Sorry examines the relationship between social justice and literature. Sorry is told from the perspective of a young white girl, Perdita, growing up in the Pilbara in Western Australia in the 1930s and 40s. She lives in a remote shack with her cold parents; her mother Stella, who's always reciting Shakespeare, and her brutish anthropologist father, Nicholas. Perdita finds more affection from her friends, Billy her deaf neighbour and Mary, the family's Aboriginal domestic servant. When Nicholas is murdered, Mary confesses and is sent away, leaving Perdita bereft, with a stutter and unable to remember the circumstances of her father's murder. This is a novel that explores the legacy of the Stolen Generation and whether it's too late to say 'sorry'. It has an explicit political agenda and, in the post-script, Gail Jones includes an explanatory note about the national inquiry into the stolen generation that happened 10 years ago. Gail Jones spoke to the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange in Melbourne. She starts with a reading from the beginning of Sorry.

Xinran Xue's Chopstick girls

25/06/2007
Miss Chopsticks is Xinran Xue's first novel but it builds on themes she explored on her radio show about women's experience of living in the shadows of the communist regime, and in her first book The Good Women of China. Miss Chopsticks recounts the story of three sisters who, discarded as useless and weak by the men of their village, head for the city lights of Nanjing in search of a better life. Now living in London, Xinran Xue visited Australia recently as a guest of the Sydney Writers' Festival. She spoke to Cathy Pryor about her 'chopstick' girls and her continuing hopes for the women of China.

Australian crime-writer Peter Corris

24/06/2007
Peter Corris has often been called the Godfather of contemporary Australian crime-writing and the master of the meanest Sydney streets. Cliff Hardy is just one of his creations -- there's Ray Creepy Crawley and there's Luke Dunlop and there's Richard Browning -- and at 65 Peter Corris has now published his 31st Cliff Hardy novel. Mr Hardy has been stripped of his investigator's licence and he's had an appeal denied. But then something happens to make him investigate, regardless of having his ticket removed. Peter Corris joins Ramona Koval from Sydney and reads a passage from his latest Cliff Hardy novel, Appeal Denied.

Alexis Wright's 2007 Miles Franklin Award-winning novel, Carpentaria (repeat)

22/06/2007
Born in northwestern Queensland, Alexis Wright has been involved in Indigenous rights for many decades, working as an educator and writer, including editing an anthology on land rights in Central Australia called Taking Power: Like This Old Man Here. Her first novel Plains of Promise was published in 1997 and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year and the NSW Premier's award for fiction, and has since been translated into French. Like Plains of Promise, her second novel Carpentaria is set in the vast dominating landscape of the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland. It is an epic tale of the strained relationship between the white folk of the fictional town of Desperance and the internal struggles of the Indigenous community, who are fighting for survival against an all-powerful mining company. In Carpentaria, Alexis Wright has created a world that is populated by extraordinary characters. The drift between a modern reality and a place that existed thousands of years before in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Alexis Wright spoke to Radio National's Cathy Pryor about her inspirations and her motivations. This interview was first broadcast on The Book Show on November 6, 2006.

A Chinese detective novel: The Eye of Jade

19/06/2007
Even though private detectives are banned in China, Diane Wei Liang has written a Chinese detective novel, The Eye of Jade, that uncovers family secrets from the time of the cultural revolution. Diane Wei Liang spent part of her childhood in a labour camp, and she has lived the last 18 years in the USA, and now in England. Her experience of growing up in China and her longing for Beijing infuse her debut novel The Eye of Jade -- the first in a detective series with 27-year-old detective Mei -- in this adventure she's searching for a Han dynasty jade.

Australian crime-writer Peter Corris

18/06/2007
Peter Corris has often been called the Godfather of contemporary Australian crime-writing and the master of the meanest Sydney streets. Cliff Hardy is just one of his creations -- there's Ray Creepy Crawley and there's Luke Dunlop and there's Richard Browning -- and at 65 Peter Corris has now published his 31st Cliff Hardy novel. Mr Hardy has been stripped of his investigator's licence and he's had an appeal denied. But then something happens to make him investigate, regardless of having his ticket removed. Peter Corris joins Ramona Koval from Sydney and reads a passage from his latest Cliff Hardy novel, Appeal Denied.

The Power of Literature: Andrew O'Hagan   Read Transcript

17/06/2007
Today we bring you the opening address of the 2007 Sydney Writers' Festival by one of Scotland's most gifted writers, Andrew O'Hagan. In his address titled 'The Power of Literature: The News That Stays News', he argues that words and imagination are our great protectors. And when you hear what he has to say, delivered in his sonorous Glasgow accent, you might also walk away convinced of the power of books. It's quite a feast of ideas this morning, told by an erudite and funny writer, so I hope you can stay with us. But first a little more about Andrew O'Hagan, widely recognised as one of the finest writers in the UK. He's been twice Booker-shortlisted for his novels Personality and Be Near Me. He writes for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. His latest book, Be Near Me, a novel about the nature of moral ambivalence, tells the story of a priest and his developing relationship with teenagers Mark and Lisa. It's about the effects of grief, longing and the violence of the mob. You might have heard my interview with Andrew O'Hagan here on The Book Show late last year. O'Hagan's work has always concerned itself with Scottish identity, and more generally with the structures and ideas that hold societies together and the frail bonds which hold individuals to the body of society -- with a tender concern for the people who find themselves adrift and inadequate. Here he is, Andrew O'Hagan, with his opening address to this year's Sydney Writers' Festival, 'The Power of Literature, The News That Stays News'.

Book Expo America

14/06/2007
Book Expos are the place where publishers big and small go to wheel and deal and to discover the Next Big Thing. And Book Expo America is one of the largest forums for book business in the world. For the Book Show, Brendan Gullifer reports from this year's Book Expo America, which ran in New York City from 31 May to 3 June.

Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game   Read Transcript

12/06/2007
In his debut novel De Niro's Game, Montreal based writer Rawi Hage paints a portrait of two young men, Bassam and George, growing up in Beirut during the Lebanon war of the 1980s. Bassam and George have few choices for the future as their daily lives are ruled by guns, power and most importantly luck -- for kicks, young men play Russian roulette like the men in the movie The Deerhunter that stars Robert De Niro. Rawi Hage grew up in Lebanon during the war and this book reflects his experience -- but it's told in a poetic language that captures the madness of war. For The Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Rawi Hage at the Sydney Writers' Festival and asked him why George and Bassam make the different choices they make; Bassam into petty crime to fund his dream to leave Beirut -- and to leave Lebanon -- and George into the Christian militia.

Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land   Read Transcript

10/06/2007
One of America's greatest living writers, Richard Ford, discusses the third in his trilogy The Lay of the Land. It follows the life of American everyman Frank Bascombe, the real estate salesman facing prostate cancer and the breakdown of his second marriage in the so-called Permanent Period of his life. Richard Ford speaks to Ramona Koval at the Sydney Writers' Festival.

The Power of Literature: Andrew O'Hagan   Read Transcript

08/06/2007
Today we bring you the opening address of the 2007 Sydney Writers' Festival by one of Scotland's most gifted writers, Andrew O'Hagan. In his address titled 'The Power of Literature: The News That Stays News', he argues that words and imagination are our great protectors. And when you hear what he has to say, delivered in his sonorous Glasgow accent, you might also walk away convinced of the power of books. It's quite a feast of ideas this morning, told by an erudite and funny writer, so I hope you can stay with us. But first a little more about Andrew O'Hagan, widely recognised as one of the finest writers in the UK. He's been twice Booker-shortlisted for his novels Personality and Be Near Me. He writes for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. His latest book, Be Near Me, a novel about the nature of moral ambivalence, tells the story of a priest and his developing relationship with teenagers Mark and Lisa. It's about the effects of grief, longing and the violence of the mob. You might have heard my interview with Andrew O'Hagan here on The Book Show late last year. O'Hagan's work has always concerned itself with Scottish identity, and more generally with the structures and ideas that hold societies together and the frail bonds which hold individuals to the body of society -- with a tender concern for the people who find themselves adrift and inadequate. Here he is, Andrew O'Hagan, with his opening address to this year's Sydney Writers' Festival, 'The Power of Literature, The News That Stays News'.

Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost

07/06/2007
In Greek mythology, Orpheus was believed to be one of the chief poets and musicians of antiquity, and the inventor or perfector of the lyre. He travels to the underworld in search of his dead wife, Eurydice. In Janette Turner Hospital's new novel, Orpheus Lost, mathematically gifted Leela, from the town of Promised Land in the American South, travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of her lover Mishka, a musician from the Daintree in northern Queensland. It's a book that explores the nature of obsession and some of the issues of our time of terror.

The poetry of Bei Dao

05/06/2007
Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of the tragedy at Tiannanmen Square in China. Bei Dao's poems became slogans for the many students who gathered in 1989 seeking change, and today we hear his conversation with Ramona Koval at the Sydney Writers' Festival, accompanied by his translator, Eliot Weinberger.

Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land   Read Transcript

04/06/2007
One of America's greatest living writers, Richard Ford, discusses the third in his trilogy The Lay of the Land. It follows the life of American everyman Frank Bascombe, the real estate salesman facing prostate cancer and the breakdown of his second marriage in the so-called Permanent Period of his life. Richard Ford speaks to Ramona Koval at the Sydney Writers' Festival.

David Malouf's Typewriter Music   Read Transcript

03/06/2007
David Malouf has just brought out his latest collection of poems, Typewriter Music, which happens to be the first collection of Malouf poems in 26 years. David Malouf describes Typewriter Music as 'A collection of poems written during 10 years or more...Some of them were written in Italy, others were written in Sydney and have echoes in earlier poems, or in novels or stories; or they spring from the same interest in words and music that produced the librettos.'

David Malouf's Typewriter Music   Read Transcript

29/05/2007
David Malouf has just brought out his latest collection of poems, Typewriter Music, which happens to be the first collection of Malouf poems in 26 years. David Malouf describes Typewriter Music as 'A collection of poems written during 10 years or more...Some of them were written in Italy, others were written in Sydney and have echoes in earlier poems, or in novels or stories; or they spring from the same interest in words and music that produced the librettos.'

Mike Davis's history of car bombs

28/05/2007
Mike Davis is an urban theorist and is professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. He first shot to fame in the early 90s with an analysis of the urban politics of Los Angeles in his book, City of Quartz. He has since written many books that build on the theme of cities, urban decay, surveillance and ecological disaster. His latest book is all about the car bomb and it's called Buda's Wagon: A Short History of the Car Bomb. In it he chronicles the devastating impact of the car bomb from Saigon to Lebanon, trying to come to terms with how this low-tech weapon has brought established armies to their knees. The first known case of a car bomb was on Wall Street, New York in 1920 and the culprit was – most likely – the Italian anarchist Mario Buda. For Mike Davis, the proliferation of the car bomb goes hand-in-hand with what he calls the militarisation of public space. In classic Davis doomsday language, he calls the car bomb the 'poor man's airforce'.

The novel gene - literary Darwinism

25/05/2007
From the selfish gene to the literary gene, can evolutionary theory explain great literary works, our love of storytelling and the behaviour of characters in novels? In an article for the New Scientist, Jonathan Gottschall argued that the present state of literary criticism is outdated, and he has applied what he terms 'Darwinian literary theory' to works like Homer's Iliad, and to Jane Austen's novels. Today on the Book Show we explore whether there is a relationship between natural selection and our penchant for storytelling.

Michael Ondaatje on Divisadero   Read Transcript

20/05/2007
Recorded at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, the celebrated author of The English patient and In the skin of a lion, speaks to Ramona Koval about his remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time, Divisadero. Divisadero begins in the 1970s on a ranch in northern California, where Coop, Claire and the narrator – who, as the story opens, tells us she has stopped calling herself Anna – are divided by an act of violence. Anna's mother died giving birth to her. Claire was also orphaned at birth and was left without a family, so Anna's father took both babies home from the hospital and raised them as sisters. Coop is five years older. His parents, who owned the next farm, were murdered by their own hired hand when he was four. Michael Ondaatje begins with a reading from Divisadero.

Bird watching with Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson   Read Transcript

20/05/2007
Today, Ramona Koval presents an event from the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, with Canadian husband-and-wife team Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, who are both authors and both avid bird-watchers. They speak of their wonder and intense involvement with the life of birds, and with birds' relationships to humans. One of the most exquisite books to appear on our shelves in recent times has been a lovingly crafted collection of stories and images, poems and observations, myths and science; all gathered together as The Bedside Book Of Birds: An Avian Miscellany with introductions to each chapter by Graeme Gibson. Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson have been named joint honorary president of the Rare Bird Division of BirdLife international – an appointment which caused Margaret to describe them as 'the William and Mary of Orange of Birding'.

Post-Soviet writing in Russia

18/05/2007
At the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, Ramona Koval spoke to three expatriate Russian writers – David Bezmozgis, Bakhyt Kenjeev, and Mikhail Iossel – about Putin's Russia and whether the political climate there is affecting Russian writers today. Are they feeling the weight of Putin's repression? A recent report from Russia is that journalists from its largest independent radio news network have been instructed to report "positive" Russian news at least 50 per cent of the time. Journalists working for the Russian News Service were also informed that opposition leaders could not be mentioned and the US was to be portrayed as an enemy.

Noah Richler's Literary Atlas of Canada

17/05/2007
Writer and broadcaster Noah Richler is this year's winner of the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada. The jury for the prize described it as a window into Candian writing in the present day. Ramona Koval brings you her chat with Noah Richler at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal.

The joy of living of Kadar Abdollah

16/05/2007
Today you'll meet a very charismatic writer who was born in Iran, but who now lives in the Netherlands and writes best-sellers in Dutch: Kadar Abdollah is his name. My Father's Notebook is his first novel to be translated into English. Kadar Abdollah was a physics student and a politically active one in Tehran who resisted first the regime of the Shah and then the Ayatollah Khomeini. He wrote for a banned publication and secretly published two books about life under Khomeini and subsequently found himself fleeing Iran in 1985 and coming to the Netherlands as a refugee in 1988. My Father's Notebook is a complex and tender book, and Kadar Abdollah was in conversation with Ramona Koval at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal.

Bird watching with Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson   Read Transcript

15/05/2007
Today, Ramona Koval presents an event from the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, with Canadian husband-and-wife team Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, who are both authors and both avid bird-watchers. They speak of their wonder and intense involvement with the life of birds, and with birds' relationships to humans. One of the most exquisite books to appear on our shelves in recent times has been a lovingly crafted collection of stories and images, poems and observations, myths and science; all gathered together as The bedside book of cirds: an avian miscellany with introductions to each chapter by Graeme Gibson. Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson have been named joint honorary president of the Rare Bird Division of BirdLife international – an appointment which caused Margaret to describe them as 'the William and Mary of Orange of Birding'.

Michael Ondaatje on Divisadero   Read Transcript

14/05/2007
Recorded at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, speaks to Ramona Koval about his remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time, Divisadero. Divisadero begins in the 1970s on a ranch in northern California, where Coop, Claire and the narrator – who, as the story opens, tells us she has stopped calling herself Anna – are divided by an act of violence. Anna's mother died giving birth to her. Claire was also orphaned at birth and was left without a family, so Anna's father took both babies home from the hospital and raised them as sisters. Coop is five years older. His parents, who owned the next farm, were murdered by their own hired hand when he was four. Michael Ondaatje begins with a reading from Divisadero.

Sucked In, by Shane Maloney

13/05/2007
For fans of Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan series, the wait is over. Number six in the series is here. Sucked In. No – that's the title. It's 1997 in Victoria and the premier of the state is lording it over everyone and everything – standing tall at the opening of a big new casino. And Murray Whelan himself? The ALP member for Melbourne Upper is enduring the long lonely slog of opposition – and within a page or two of his new adventure, he is indeed sucked in – this time into a mystery about some human remains that have turned up in a dried-up lake. If you're already addicted to these very funny books, then your new fix has arrived. And if you're new to the Murray Whelan books, why not start here? Murray Whelan's creator (and winner of the wonderfully named Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel) Shane Maloney joins Michael Gurr for a natter.

The Secret of Lost Things with Sheridan Hay

10/05/2007
In Sheridan Hay's debut novel The Secret of Lost Things the 18-year-old Tasmanian, Rosemary Savage, goes to New York after the death of her mother and finds a job at the Arcade – a huge, rambling bookstore – and ends up working with people who seem like they've just stepped off the pages of a Dickens novel. The Secret of Lost Things is a coming-of-age novel about a young woman dealing with grief and finding that a big part of her education is in the bookstore. But there's also a literary twist, she ends up on an adventure searching for records of Herman Melville's lost manuscript The Isle of the Cross. Along the way there are also references to Melville's Moby Dick and Redburn, but also to Shakespeare's Tempest. In her novel, Sheridan Hay explores the idea of the work-within-the-work. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Australian born Sheridan Hay in New York, where she has lived for many years. Sheridan starts with a reading from the book.

Daniel Mason's A Far Country

08/05/2007
When drought and war grip the backlands in Daniel Mason's A Far Country, fourteeen-year-old Isabel is sent by her family to live with relatives in the settlements in the south. Her beloved older brother Isaias moved there several months earlier, but now he has gone missing. While Isabel settles into her new life, finding him becomes her obsession. Daniel Mason is speaking from California to the Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.

Sucked In, by Shane Maloney

07/05/2007
For fans of Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan series, the wait is over. Number six in the series is here. Sucked In. No – that's the title. It's 1997 in Victoria and the premier of the state is lording it over everyone and everything – standing tall at the opening of a big new casino. And Murray Whelan himself? The ALP member for Melbourne Upper is enduring the long lonely slog of opposition – and within a page or two of his new adventure, he is indeed sucked in – this time into a mystery about some human remains that have turned up in a dried-up lake. If you're already addicted to these very funny books, then your new fix has arrived. And if you're new to the Murray Whelan books, why not start here? Murray Whelan's creator (and winner of the wonderfully named Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel) Shane Maloney joins Michael Gurr for a natter.

Justin Wintle's The Perfect Hostage: the story of Aung San Suu Kyi   Read Transcript

06/05/2007
Aung San Suu Kyi is more than one Burmese woman's name – it's a name that has come to represent a particular kind of resistance to dictatorship. As the imprisoned figurehead of the Burmese democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi is often spoken of with a kind of reverence. Now freedom always needs its heroes, but sometimes the flesh-and-blood person can get lost behind the icon. Justin Wintle is a British author, reviewer and journalist who's written a book that is as much a portrait of Burma as it is of its human subject. Perfect Hostage is one of those rare non-fiction books that has you in suspense even when you know what's going to happen; you know what's coming even as you panic at its approach. Justin Wintle has written widely about Vietnam, China, Spain, Islam...and now a book that goes a long way towards making very vivid the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi – the real one, not the silent enigma of Western imagination. Justin Wintle joins Michael Gurr from London and Michael observes that this is a book underpinned by a fierce indignation. He asks Justin if that indignation was there for him when he started writing –or did it grow?

Dorothy Porter: El Dorado

06/05/2007
When you hear the words 'widely read' and 'poet' in the same sentence, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone's got something wrong. But Dorothy Porter's verse novels have won thousands of new readers to a form that many people are a little bit scared of. The Monkey's Mask has been a film, a play – and has been recently adapted for radio by the BBC. Two of Dorothy Porter's other verse novels – What a Piece of Work and Wild Surmise – have been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and she's worked with the composers Jonathon Mills and Paul Grabowsky. She's got a brand new verse novel out – it's called El Dorado – and it's about some really nasty crimes and some very troubled people.

Alex Jones on the meaning of Helen Garner

03/05/2007
Alex Jones's book Helen Garner And The Meaning of Everything is about a retired professor – the Dreamer – and his search for the meaning of everything. It's part literary detective novel, part free-fall shaggy dog story and it's also a portrait of a generation, the Baby Boomers – or at least one slice of that generation. David Malouf has called it 'farcical and slyly illuminating'. Alex Jones has spent most of his working life teaching at the University of Sydney, where language and literature were his daily food. He is now retired and joins us on The Book Show.

Tim Parks: the problem with experts

02/05/2007
Now to our scribe in Italy. Author, essayist, critic and translator Tim Parks has lived outside Milan for about 25 years, which ought to qualify him as an expert observer of Italian culture and politics. But he recently discovered that, when the media say they want an expert, nuance and complexity is the last thing they expect. After all, they have stereotypes to maintain.

Justin Wintle's The Perfect Hostage: the story of Aung San Suu Kyi

02/05/2007
Aung San Suu Kyi is more than one Burmese woman's name – it's a name that has come to represent a particular kind of resistance to dictatorship. As the imprisoned figurehead of the Burmese democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi is often spoken of with a kind of reverence. Now freedom always needs its heroes, but sometimes the flesh-and-blood person can get lost behind the icon. Justin Wintle is a British author, reviewer and journalist who's written a book that is as much a portrait of Burma as it is of its human subject. Perfect Hostage is one of those rare non-fiction books that has you in suspense even when you know what's going to happen; you know what's coming even as you panic at its approach. Justin Wintle has written widely about Vietnam, China, Spain, Islam...and now a book that goes a long way towards making very vivid the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi – the real one, not the silent enigma of Western imagination. Justin Wintle joins Michael Gurr from London and Michael observes that this is a book underpinned by a fierce indignation. He asks Justin if that indignation was there for him when he started writing –or did it grow?

Vale Vonnegut

01/05/2007
Today we're going to hold a festive wake for Kurt Vonnegut, who died last month. We all know him for Slaughterhouse Five and he's probably one of the most influential post-war American writers. This is a man who kept saying he was never going to write any more, but kept on doing just that. Joining the Book Show to consider Vonnegut and his unique writing is Chris Palmer, who teaches in the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe University in Melbourne. And Terry Lane, broadcaster and writer well known to Radio National listeners. He's a Kurt Vonnegut fan as well.

Dorothy Porter: El Dorado

30/04/2007
When you hear the words 'widely read' and 'poet' in the same sentence, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone's got something wrong. But Dorothy Porter's verse novels have won thousands of new readers to a form that many people are a little bit scared of. The Monkey's Mask has been a film, a play – and has been recently adapted for radio by the BBC. Two of Dorothy Porter's other verse novels – What a Piece of Work and Wild Surmise – have been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and she's worked with the composers Jonathon Mills and Paul Grabowsky. She's got a brand new verse novel out – it's called El Dorado – and it's about some really nasty crimes and some very troubled people.

John Pilger   Read Transcript

29/04/2007
Today, Ramona speaks to a writer who has been called a lank-haired Australian Messiah, the only man who cuts through the lies of the corporate media to bring The Truth. He's been called a lot of other less positive things by his detractors. And he has many. Multi-award-winning war correspondent, broadcaster, filmmaker and writer John Pilger has a new book titled Freedom Next Time and, later this year, a new film, The War On Democracy, will be in Australian cinemas.

More than just recipes - Claudia Roden and the food and culture of the Middle East

29/04/2007
"When I was a child in Egypt", Claudia Roden writes in her latest book, Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, "Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, and the mountain resorts of Lebanon were our Switzerland. People went there to recuperate." In this enchanting book, Claudia Roden returns to the countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco in search of new and old recipes and to find out how cooking has evolved since she first introduced us to these cuisines in the 1960s. The result is a tribute to the different culinary histories and contemporary food of these fascinating countries, from the mezze dishes of Turkey and the sweet pastries of Lebanon to the unmistakable flavours and spices of Morocco. Claudia's books are more than collections of recipes: they are evocative books full of stories and memories, histories of the people and cultures she meets along the way. Roden, who describes herself as "both Arab and Jew", was born to a cosmopolitan Jewish family in Cairo, where she grew up eating - and questioning the origin of - food from all over the Middle East. She began by collating recipes at a young age from everybody she met, from family members to virtual strangers. "Food was," she explains, "a way of re-connecting with my culture - my lost heritage. And the discovery of a 13th century manuscript in the British Library eventually led to my interest in food sociology and anthropology." Today we hear Claudia Roden recorded at the last Edinburgh International Book Festival.

More than just recipes: Claudia Roden and the food and culture of the Middle East

27/04/2007
'When I was a child in Egypt', Claudia Roden writes in her latest book, Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, 'Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, and the mountain resorts of Lebanon were our Switzerland. People went there to recuperate.' In this enchanting book, Claudia Roden returns to the countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco in search of new and old recipes and to find out how cooking has evolved since she first introduced us to these cuisines in the 1960s. The result is a tribute to the different culinary histories and contemporary food of these fascinating countries, from the mezze dishes of Turkey and the sweet pastries of Lebanon to the unmistakable flavours and spices of Morocco. Claudia's books are more than collections of recipes: they are evocative books full of stories and memories, histories of the people and cultures she meets along the way. Roden, who describes herself as 'both Arab and Jew', was born to a cosmopolitan Jewish family in Cairo, where she grew up eating – and questioning the origin of – food from all over the Middle East. She began by collating recipes at a young age from everybody she met, from family members to virtual strangers. 'Food was,' she explains, 'a way of re-connecting with my culture – my lost heritage. And the discovery of a 13th century manuscript in the British Library eventually led to my interest in food sociology and anthropology.' Today we hear Claudia Roden recorded at the last Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The Uncomfortable Dead: a Zapatista crime thriller

26/04/2007
The novel The Uncomfortable Dead is a collaboration between the leader of the Zapatista guerrilla movement, Subcomandante Marcos, and one of Mexico's best-known writers, Paco Ignacio Taibo. Besides more than a dozen thrillers featuring his world-weary hero Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, Paco Taibo has written best-selling biographies of Che Guevara and one of the great heroes of the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa. Subcomandante Marcos was unavailable for an interview, as he was hiding in the hills, but for the Book Show Nick Caistor tracked down Paco Taibo to his Mexico City lair and starts by asking him whose idea it was to write The Uncomfortable Dead as a collaboration.

The examined life

25/04/2007
Biography and storytelling are brought to life in a discussion about the skills required to be a good observer of life. Earlier this year we heard Robert Dessaix on observation, wisdom and narrative. He was one of the speakers at The Examined Life at the State Library of NSW. Today we bring you more from The Examined Life, titled 'The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion, The Writer, The Writing and the Narrative Powers of Transformation', in which the speakers were Alice Spigelman and Arnold Zable. First we hear from Dr Vera Ranki, from The Examined Life Institute, who chaired the event and is the author of The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion.

Tim Parks on The Mezzanine

24/04/2007
Novelist, essayist and translator Tim Parks these days observes the world from his vantage point in northern Italy, just outside Milan. Today he shares his reflections on an extraordinary novel first published in 1988. It's by New York writer Nicholson Baker, and it's called The Mezzanine.

James Barr on T.E. Lawrence in Arabia

24/04/2007
James Barr graduated from Oxford with a first in Modern History, went on to write leaders for the Daily Telegraph and now works in London. Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-18 is his first book. Here he is speaking at last year's Edinburgh Festival.

The Dangerous Book For Boys: Conn Iggulden (repeat)   Read Transcript

19/04/2007
Now I'm going to talk to the men out there (although I suspect a lot of women will relate to this as well). How many of you have fond memories of a childhood full of books that told you how to make things, how to do things that were really fun, told you ripping yarns -- Boys Own Annuals, Eagle Comics, Coles Funny Picture Books? (First broadcast 28/2/2007)

Alan Spence's The Pure Land (repeat)

18/04/2007
Scottish writer Alan Spence joins us with a discussion about his new book The Pure Land. This novel is a retelling of the story of Tom Glover, a Scottish trader who helped open up Japan to the western world in the mid-nineteenth century, and whose story was one of the sources for the sad tale of Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly. Alan Spence begins with a reading from The Pure Land. (First broadcast 8/3/2007)

Sarah Dunant's In the Company of the Courtesan   Read Transcript

15/04/2007
The setting for Sarah Dunant's new novel In the Company of the Courtesan is 16th century Venice. It opens with the violent sack of Rome in 1527 by Spanish and German armies, and there we meet Bucino Teodoldi, a protective and clever dwarf employed by Fiammetta Bianchini, Rome's most celebrated courtesan, all of 21 years old. Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant trained as a historian at Cambridge. She is known for her crime novels featuring private investigator Hannah Wolfe, and more recently for her historical novels, the first of which was The Birth of Venus. Sarah Dunant joined the Book Show from London and starts with a reading from In the Company of the Courtesan.

Life writing, trauma and healing

13/04/2007
How healing is it to write personal stories of trauma about very intimate subjects like child abuse, neglect and incest – and then to publish them? This may sound like a heavy subject, but these painful stories are often tales of survival. Might this explain why they're so popular with readers and why they're flying off the bookstore shelves? In today's panel discussion we take a deeper look into the issues around traumatic life writing. What are the ethics of revealing all, what are the risks, and is it therapeutic?

Sarah Dunant's In the Company of the Courtesan   Read Transcript

12/04/2007
The setting for Sarah Dunant's new novel In the Company of the Courtesan is 16th century Venice. It opens with the violent sack of Rome in 1527 by Spanish and German armies, and there we meet Bucino Teodoldi, a protective and clever dwarf employed by Fiammetta Bianchini, Rome's most celebrated courtesan, all of 21 years old. Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant trained as a historian at Cambridge. She is known for her crime novels featuring private investigator Hannah Wolfe, and more recently for her historical novels, the first of which was The Birth of Venus. Sarah Dunant joined the Book Show from London and starts with a reading from In the Company of the Courtesan.

Stefan Collini: 'Intellectual' is not a dirty word!

11/04/2007
Today we've been talking about how women and young people can get their ideas into the public sphere, to engage in the public debate. And if you have been following the way people argue in newspapers and other media, for example, you have to ask yourself why the term 'intellectual' has become a pejorative in many places these days? And it's not something that happens only in Australia, but in Britain too. Stefan Collini is a professor of intellectual history and English literature at Cambridge University. His book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain is a historical critique of claims made about intellectuals and analysis of the way they are discussed. Stefan spoke at last year's Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Adib Khan: Spiral Road

10/04/2007
Now to a new book by Adib Khan which deals with the loyalties – personal and political – of a migrant Muslim man, Masud Alam. After living in Richmond, an inner suburb of Melbourne, for many years, he goes back to visit his family in Bangladesh. Things are of course not the same as when he left – his father is succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, his mother is finding it hard to cope, his brother has all the family responsibilities on his shoulders, and his sister is now a divorced woman after her violent marriage has been dissolved. And of course this is post 9/11 so he is now officially living in a time of terror. Adib Khan lived in Bangladesh till 1973 when he came to Australia, studied English literature and history, and worked as a teacher. He started writing in his 40s and had great success with his first novel Seasonal Adjustments, which won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Book of the Year award in the 1994 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and the 1995 Commonwealth Writer's prize for Best Book. Spiral Road is his fifth novel and before he speaks to Ramona Koval, Adib Khan reads a passage from his book.

Adib Khan: Spiral Road

10/04/2007
Now to a new book by Adib Khan which deals with the loyalties – personal and political – of a migrant Muslim man, Masud Alam. After living in Richmond, an inner suburb of Melbourne, for many years, he goes back to visit his family in Bangladesh. Things are of course not the same as when he left – his father is succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, his mother is finding it hard to cope, his brother has all the family responsibilities on his shoulders, and his sister is now a divorced woman after her violent marriage has been dissolved. And of course this is post 9/11 so he is now officially living in a time of terror. Adib Khan lived in Bangladesh till 1973 when he came to Australia, studied English literature and history, and worked as a teacher. He started writing in his 40s and had great success with his first novel Seasonal Adjustments, which won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Book of the Year award in the 1994 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and the 1995 Commonwealth Writer's prize for Best Book. Spiral Road is his fifth novel and before he speaks to Ramona Koval, Adib Khan reads a passage from his book.

David Batstone and modern-day slavery

09/04/2007
While the world celebrates the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade in England, in his new book Not for Sale: The return of the global slave trade and how we can fight it, ethicist David Batstone writes about a new generation of abolitionists. David Batstone is Professor of Ethics at the University of San Francisco, and as a journalist and businessman, he promotes ethical buiness practice and corporate culture. Recently, he has been touring Australia with World Vision's 'Stop the Traffic' campaign. For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to David Batstone in Melbourne about his book Not For Sale.

Calum's Road: Roger Hutchinson

08/04/2007
Some time in the 1950s (we can't be sure exactly when), a shy, unassuming, but articulate Scotsman called Calum MacLeod left his crofter's cottage early one morning, with a wheelbarrow, a pickaxe, a shovel and a crowbar. He walked some miles south of his home on the wild, beautiful and tiny Hebridean island of Raasay and he started to build a road. This moment was the beginning of a remarkable achievement by one man, a feat that took more than 10 years to complete, and one that's entered the realm of Scottish, British, even European legend. But this extraordinary act was not meant as some great theatrical flourish. It was in fact the last gasp of defiance in the face of terrible treatment meted out to many generations of traditional residents of Raasay (and many other remote islands and regions of Scotland). These were acts of forced removal and transportation by wealthy landowners in the 19th century and, more recently, disregard by governments and