The Book Show

Past Programs

Books - Authors - 2008

2008 | 2007 | 2006

Taboos in literature

05/12/2008
It's 50 years since the controversial novel Lolita was published and Nabokov said that there were only three taboos in literature: incest, inter-racial marriage and atheism. What is taboo now?

The poetry of Robert Adamson

03/12/2008
The 'Huck Finn of the Hawkesbury' is how Robert Adamson was described by one reviewer when his first book was published in 1970. He's one of Australia's leading contemporary poets and a successful writer, editor and publisher. His autobiography Inside Out won the New South Wales Premier's History Award, and he received the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in literature. Robert Adamson's new collection of poetry The Golden Bird brings together the best of his published work as well as many new poems.

Montana's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas (Review)   Read Transcript

02/12/2008
Enrique Vila-Matas has earned a reputation in Europe as one of Spain's most important living writers. Montano's Malady is the second of his novels to be translated into English. Don Anderson was so impressed by Vila-Matas's earlier book Bartleby & Co that he has read and re-read Montano's Malady for The Book Show. Although the book's described as a 'novel' he suggests it might be more useful to think of Vila-Matas as pioneering a new literary form. Some reviewers have found it hard going, but Don believes it's well worth the effort.

Malla Nunn's Beautiful Place to Die

01/12/2008
Malla Nunn's novel A Beautiful Place to Die is a detective thriller set in 1950s South Africa. The dead body discovered in the opening pages is that of Captain Willem Pretorius, an Afrikaans Police Captain from the small backwater town of Jacob's Rest. Detective Emanuel Cooper is sent to investigate, just before the Security Branch show up. This is a time when the colour of a person's skin was the most important thing about them, a time when mixed marriages were illegal and when Malla Nunn's parents were forced to make difficult choices about race.

True crime writing

28/11/2008
Recently The Law Report's Damien Carrick moderated a conversation with two authors of true crime books, Helen Garner and Kara Lawrence. Helen Garner is well known for both fiction and non-fiction. Her latest novel is The Spare Room, but in this discussion she revisits her 2004 non-fiction book Joe Cinque's Consolation. Kara Lawrence is a crime writer with The Daily Telegraph. The event was part of the National Investigations Conference, a gathering of professional investigators who work for various police forces, anti-corruption watchdogs and ombudsmen's offices.

Louis Nowra on ice

27/11/2008
Louis Nowra, novelist, playwright, essayist and screenwriter, has a new book out. It's a novel called Ice, a meditation on the many forms of ice: frozen water, ice the drug, ice as death, ice as preservation. It starts with a huge iceberg being towed into Sydney Harbour in the second half of the 19th century.

Moving Galleries: train poetry

26/11/2008
Do you stare out the window when you're on the train, listen to music, read the newspaper or your own book? Now, if you're in Melbourne, you can also read haikus and ponder art. With Connex, the Committee for Melbourne has put up poetry inside the carriages of 40 trains in all. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange travelled the Glen Waverley line with some of the poets whose work is in these 'Moving Galleries'.

The Prometheus myth reworked: Michel Faber

25/11/2008
Novelist and short story writer Michel Faber has created a new version of the Prometheus myth in The Fire Gospel. In the myth, Zeus is so angry that Prometheus has stolen fire and given it to mere humans, he binds up the thief and allows an eagle to peck out his liver for all eternity. In Michel Faber's The Fire Gospel, Prometheus is a Canadian academic called Theo Griepenkerl. In Iraq for his university, he is inspecting a museum when a bomb goes off. It kills the curator and destroys a statue, releasing nine scrolls of Aramaic text that had been hidden inside. Griepenkerl happens to be an Aramaic scholar and he steals the documents, which turn out to be the memoir of Malchus, a first century Christian convert and witness to the crucifixion.

Alan Wearne's The Australian Popular Songbook (review)

24/11/2008
Alan Wearne has been writing poems since his university days in the 1960s. He's published several collections of poetry, two acclaimed verse novels—The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers volumes one and two—and a prose work, Kicking in Danger, a fantasy/satire on Melbourne and its football culture. His latest collection of poetry is called The Australian Popular Songbook. It's arranged in three sections: the first has poems that take their titles from Australian popular songs; the second, called 'The Metropolitan Poems', features urban Australian locations; and the last section is made up of a single long free-verse poem, 'Breakfast with Darky'. Geoff Page reviews The Australian Popular Songbook.

The sister arts in Australia

24/11/2008
Painting and the visual arts, poetry, fiction and music are said to have a family resemblance and the dialogue between the forms has been described as the sister arts. In the early days of Australian writing, authors who incorporated the sister arts in their narratives were considered derivative—even un-Australian. These were writers like Henry Handel Richardson and Eleanor Dark, who today we think of as definitively Australian. The rivalry and correspondence between the sister arts is the subject of the latest Southerly journal.

Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography   Read Transcript

20/11/2008
Professor Jill Roe has produced a substantial biography of Stella Miles Franklin, the author of My Brilliant Career, who left a legacy that's remembered every year in the Miles Franklin Award for Australian Writing. It's the story of a feisty and smart young woman who had early literary success and who made a career out of agitating for women's and workers' rights and in journalism. It's also a story of amazing application to the task of writing, whether the work was published or not, and it's a portait of the times in which she lived.

A Most Wanted Man - John le Carré   Read Transcript

19/11/2008
A strange thin young Russian-speaking man claiming to be a Chechen Muslim appears in Hamburg. Add in a passionate young German human rights lawyer, a 60-year-old Scottish banker with a cooling marriage and an estranged daughter, a German spy and his female sidekick, and the hunt for the young man in order to connect him with a terrorist network. A Most Wanted Man is the latest book from John le Carré, the nom de plume for author David Cornwell.

Vale Ivan Southall

18/11/2008
Ivan Southall died last Saturday at the age of 87. He wrote over 30 novels for young people and seven books for adults, winning all kinds of prizes and accolades along the way and being translated into over 20 languages. Many children read his Hill's End at school in the mid-60s and it's one of the books that was regarded as a turning point in Australian children's literature. It marked the beginning of a series of Southall novels which tackled the idea of children overcoming terrible events. In 1997 he wrote Ziggurat. It tells the story of Nut who, at the age of 17, disappears, leaving no evidence to point to whether he went by compulsion or of his own accord. He awakens in another place and to another existence. Has he died? He makes a journey to discover what has happened to him, who he is and what he believes, with the help of a dog called Sam and a lion. This is an interview Ramona Koval did with Ivan Southall in 1997.

Robyn Rowland's personal muse

18/11/2008
Truth and fact are tenets of biography, but what about in memoir poetry? Can you tell a lie to tell the truth using the lyrical crafts to get to the heart of the matter? Poet Robyn Rowland calls herself an historian of private life and says her personal poetry allows her to connect with readers on a deep level. An essay she's written on the topic is in the latest Meanjin Quarterly – it's called 'Life in the raw with the personal muse'.

Remix My Lit -- literary mash-ups

13/11/2008
Remixing is a word that is often more associated with music than the literary domain. But it's been said that there are really only seven storylines and that every story has already been told. So does that mean that all stories are cover versions? In this litigious world, reworking and then publishing a piece inspired by your favourite writer is a legal problem. Remix My Lit has gathered the work of some prominent Australian writers who have given their fans free range to remix their short stories in whatever way they like -- because they're licensed under Creative Commons.

Writer beware! How to avoid writing scams

11/11/2008
The literary equivalent of the Nigerian scam that politely asks for your bank details is the writing scam. Writer Beware gives writers advice on how to avoid writing scams, unscrupulous literary agents and bogus writing contests. Victoria Strauss operates the website for Writer Beware and is the co-founder and vice-chair of Science Fiction Writers of America Committee on Writing Scams. Max Barry is the author of the satirical novels Company, Jennifer Government and Syrup. He also has some handy tips for getting published without being scammed.

Italian author in hiding from Mafia threat

10/11/2008
There's a price you pay for attacking the Mafia and Italian author and journalist Roberto Saviano is paying that price. Two years ago he exposed the Neapolitan Mafia in his bestselling book Gomorrah, an up-close account of the inner workings of the crime group that's operated around Naples for more than a century. The book became a bestseller, was translated into 47 languages, and has now been made into an award-winning film. But Gomorrah's success has driven Roberto Saviano into the shadows, with the Neapolitan crime bosses threatening to kill him before Christmas. The Book Show's Linda LoPresti spoke to Roberto Saviano, who's in hiding under state protection

The Atlantic Ocean - essays by Andrew O'Hagan

07/11/2008
The ebullient Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan is best known for his fiction. He has written three novels: Our Fathers, Personality and Be Near Me which have all won prizes. But he also has a reputation as a writer of non-fiction. He's a contributing editor with The London Review of Books and has been described as 'the best essayist of his generation' by The New York Times. At this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival he spoke with journalist Magnus Linklater about his latest book The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America.

Ursula K. Le Guin   Read Transcript

05/11/2008
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the best and most prolific writers of science fiction and fantasy in the world. She's published 20 novels and written several short story collections, children's books and poetry. She's a creator of other worlds, sometimes with wizards and dragons, sometimes with spaceships and telepathy. Her new book, Lavinia, is based on a character from Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid. In Virgil's story, we meet Lavinia only fleetingly as the second wife of Aeneas, the epic's hero, who travelled to Italy and became the ancestor of the Romans. Her mother wants her to marry her cousin Turnus, who reigns over the neighbouring kingdom, but Lavinia seems to have doubts. The day before Aeneas arrives by ship, in an omen, Lavinia's hair swirls in a ghostly fire. This apparently augurs war, and that's what happens. Ursula Le Guin retells the last six books of the twelve-book poem from the point of view of Lavinia, a confident and outspoken young woman with a respect for the power of spirits, especially the spirit of Virgil.

Ouyang Yu's Kingsbury Tales

03/11/2008
Ouyang Yu is best known for his poetry, but has also written fiction and criticism in both English and Chinese. Ouyang Yu came from China in 1991 after some years as a published poet, fiction and non-fiction writer and literary translator. He established and edited Otherland, Australia's first Chinese-English journal, and holds a PhD in Australian Literature from La Trobe University. Translation, transformation and being between cultures are themes that Ouyang Yu often writes about and he has returned to these themes in his collection of poetry called The Kingsbury Tales.

Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay

03/11/2008
At the age of 21, while studying at Harvard University, Sarah Manguso was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease -- chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP). It's a form of Guillain-Barre Syndrome which afflicted the writer Joseph Heller. CIDP causes fatigue, paralysis, and imbalance. And then there's the side-effects to the medication. Sarah Manguso calculates that she was sick for nine years. She has written a poetic account of this experience in her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay. It's composed in a similar style to her prose poetry which has been published in the collections The Captain Lands in Paradise and Siste Viator. She's also had a collection of flash fiction published -- Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape.

Marilynne Robinson's Home   Read Transcript

31/10/2008
Marilynne Robinson, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead, has written a new novel, Home. It takes place in the same period and the same Iowa town of Gilead in the mid 1950s. Home is set in the house of Pastor Robert Boughton. He's a widower, a retired pastor, and he's being cared for by his younger daughter Glory. She's in her late 30s and getting over a broken engagement to a man she has discovered is already married. And Jack has not been seen for some 20 years, after the disgrace of getting a young girl pregnant.

Tribute to Jacob Rosenberg

31/10/2008
Poet, memoirist and Holocaust survivor Jacob Rosenberg died yesterday at the age of 86. He was born in Poland, 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. Jacob Rosenberg came to Australia in 1948 and in the years after that wrote six volumes of poetry, a book of stories called Lives and Embers and two memoirs, East of Time and Sunrise West. East of Time won both the National Biography Award and the 2006 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Jacob Rosenberg talked to the Book Show when Sunrise West was published last year and we're replaying part of that interview today as a tribute to him.

Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review

30/10/2008
A puritanical hedonist -- this is how novelist and nonfiction writer Marilynne Robinson describes herself. She won the Pulitzer for her 2004 novel Gilead and her new book is called Home. An in-depth interview with her is in the latest Paris Review. Also on the topic of home, when 40,000 prisoners involved in the Rwandan genocide were released from jail, French journalist Jean Hatzfeld wrote about their homecoming. His article 'Together Again' is in the magazine. This is a topic close to the editor of the Paris Review, Philip Gourevitch, who wrote about the genocide in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.

John Gascoigne on the enthralling Captain Cook

30/10/2008
The cultures of 18th century Pacific Islanders and Captain Cook aren't normally thought of as having many similarities. But John Gascoigne says when it came to the knowledge of navigation and its romance, these two cultures were closer than we think. Pacific Islanders knew 200 stars by name and both cultures shared an interest in all things nautical. Professor John Gascoigne's book on Cook was short-listed for the 2008 NSW Premier's General History Prize. It's called Captain Cook: Voyager Between Worlds.

Nina Khrushcheva imagines Nabokov

29/10/2008
Nina Khrushcheva is a Russian writer and academic who proudly labels herself a foreigner. She lives in New York City, from where she gazes at her country of birth, studying and writing about where it's been and where it's heading. Nina Khrushcheva is well placed to have some views about Russia's past; she's the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. And Nina believes the man who holds a road map for Russia's future is another émigré writer who lived in America -- Vladimir Nabokov. She's recently written a book called Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, in which she entwines the life and works of the renowned novelist with her own views and reactions to his words. The ABC's Moscow correspondent Scott Bevan spoke with Nina Khrushcheva in her adopted city and she began by explaining that as she read Nabokov's books The Luzhin Defense, Lolita and particularly Speak, Memory she started to see how his writing could serve as a guide to how to be Russian in these changing times.

Public figures, private lives

28/10/2008
Is the private life of a public figure a proper subject for biography? And how does a biographer decide what to reveal and what to screen from public gaze? Historian David Day has written biographies of three public figures: Ben Chifley, John Curtin and Andrew Fisher. He discusses balancing the need to explore the private landscape of subjects with a duty to be discreet about other people's lives.

Peter Goldsworthy: Everything I Knew

27/10/2008
Australian novelist, essayist, librettist and poet Peter Goldsworthy talks about his new novel Everything I Knew. It's set in Penola, South Australia, in 1964 when Miss Peach, a new teacher on a scooter who's the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn, comes to town and fourteen-year-old Robbie Burns sits up and takes notice.

An Upwrite Man - Tim Parks on the relationship between writers and their families

24/10/2008
Tim Parks is a novelist, essayist, critic and translator. He lives in Italy with his wife and children. Earlier this year, you may remember, Tim spoke to us about his collection of literary essays The Fighter. His most recent novel, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, has just been published. The arrival of the first printed copies of a new book, and the fact that his children are now old enough to read his novels, prompted Tim to think about the relationship between writers, particularly writers of fiction, and their families.

Hunter S. Thompson in words and on film   Read Transcript

23/10/2008
There are some phrases and concepts that are forever enshrined in the mythos of a writer. For the iconoclastic Hunter S. Thompson, it's Gonzo journalism, freak power and fear and loathing. Since his suicide in 2005, there have been many memoirs, many of them authored by his friends keeping the mythology of the cult writer alive. But when it comes to a subject as complex as Hunter S.Thompson, there's always room for more.

Corporate fiction

22/10/2008
When big companies alter their policies, they often call in 'change consultants' to help change the culture of the corporation. We all know policy documents don't make for scintillating reading, so the difficulty is how to make these changes sexy. Organisations like Telstra and Queensland Rail did quite an unusual thing: they commissioned a writer to write a novel set in their company, with characters and plot to make the policies come alive. Steve Bright worked on these projects and recently wrote a story for the City of Melbourne to imagine how its policies for the city would look in the year 2020. He did this with a group of consultants who meet at a cafe every few weeks to come up with story ideas. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange sat in on one of the fiction writing sessions.

Lewis Lapham on learning

22/10/2008
Henry David Thoreau said "my desire for knowledge is intermittent , but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant". This ideal shaped his approach to learning and is just one of the reflections on knowledge, education and ignorance that editor, Lewis Lapham has assembled in the latest Lapham's Quarterly on "Ways of Learning". He also includes the writings of George Steiner, Charlotte Bronte, Salvador Dali and many others to understand the ideals of learning and how they fall short in the education system.

Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black   Read Transcript

21/10/2008
Hilary Mantel recently wrote in the Guardian newspaper about the night life of a writer, saying 'Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer, if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?' Before she was a writer Hilary Mantel trained as a lawyer and was a social worker. She has won awards for her novels, she's written short stories, and her memoir Giving up the Ghost has been described as an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction, taking the reader from early childhood to the discoveries in adulthood that led her to writing. Her last book was Beyond Black, a novel about a medium, Alison, who travels with her assistant Colette and with a spirit guide Morris who causes her great discomfort. Unlike spirit guides who tell you deep philosophical things, Morris was a scrounger and a drunk who leered and told tasteless jokes. It's a mixture of humour and horror and, as Hilary Mantel says, it's 'just like life'.

Morris Lurie's To Light Attained   Read Transcript

20/10/2008
Australian writer Morris Lurie was the winner of the 2006 Patrick White Award. His new novel is To Light Attained. In it we meet Herschel Himmelman, who tells us the story of his daughter, his marriage, his state of mind and his search to understand why his troubled daughter has suicided in her early twenties. It's a father's anguish in words.

House of Exile by Evelyn Juers   Read Transcript

17/10/2008
In Evelyn Juers' book House of Exile we meet Heinrich Mann and his wife -- 24 years his junior -- Nelly Kroeger. Heinrich was Nobel-prize-winner Thomas Mann's less famous brother. He was a writer too, and a political activist, and his wife was a bar hostess. It was a marriage that was not exactly approved of by the wealthy, middle-class Mann family. But that was the least of their worries -- Heinrich was a critic of the National Socialists and they fled Germany in 1933, ending up in sunny California, USA, with other expat European intellectuals. This is a book that challenges traditional understandings of biography.

Melissa Lucashenko on survival

16/10/2008
In the second in this year's '3 Writers' Sydney PEN lecture series novelist and essayist Melissa Lucashenko looks at what we mean by survival, both historically and in the modern world. Is survival a sign of strength or is it just about hanging on?

Jazz and literature - Sascha Feinstein   Read Transcript

15/10/2008
Sascha Feinstein is a poet, essayist, saxophonist and professor of English. He is the founding editor of Brilliant Corners, a journal on jazz and literature. Sascha Feinstein's latest book Ask Me Now is a collection of musings by writers, musicians, and producers on the relationship between these two forms.

Books to read to children during financial ruin -- Erica Perl

14/10/2008
Each day we hear of the worsening state of the world economic system. Of course, it's not the only time there's been an international financial crisis -- just think of the 30s Great Depression, the 70s oil crisis or the recession in the 80s. For many young people though, this is their first experience of global economic collapse. As Erica Perl has found, a look at children's books written during tough times reveals a recurring theme of economic hardship. They seem to be sending a message to kids that times have been worse.

The Twelfth Fish by Graham Perrett

14/10/2008
If you were asked to name a politician who was also a novelist, who would you think of? British Conservative Jeffrey Archer perhaps? Or his 19th century predecessor Benjamin Disraeli? The ALP's Graham Perrett represents the federal seat of Moreton in Queensland and was elected to parliament in November last year. Now Graham is also a published novelist. His first book, The Twelfth Fish, is about a school teacher who is posted to the small town of Lawson in outback Queensland.

Sadanand Dhume: My Friend the Fanatic   Read Transcript

13/10/2008
Sadanand Dhume was in Bali six years ago when terrorists attacked two nightclubs in Kuta. He was on assignment for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal. What he saw in Bali led him to investigate the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia and to write a book about his discoveries, My Friend the Fanatic.

Frank Moorhouse -- The control of the imagination

10/10/2008
The fallout from the Bill Henson photos of teenagers continues. The Australia Council recently asked for submissions on the depiction of children in art. It plans to develop protocols for artists around this subject. Frank Moorhouse has long been involved in anti-censorship campaigns. This is part of a presentation he gave at the National Young Writers' Festival about the control of the imagination. In this speech, Frank Moorhouse looks into what he sees as the implications for arts, literature and freedom of expression of these possible Australia Council protocols.

2008 Nobel Prize for Literature winner

10/10/2008
The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced last night. This year the prize has gone to French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Speaking to reporters in Paris, Le Clezio said he was very honoured and when asked if he deserved the prize he replied "Why not?". Dr Jacqueline Dutton, head of French Studies at the University of Melbourne, has met Le Clezio and written a book about his work. She and Professor James English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value, discuss the prize with Ramona Koval.

Robert Drewe's reading life

09/10/2008
At this year's Melbourne Writers Festival Robert Drewe talked about his reading life and the books that have inspired him. Robert Drewe's books have earned numerous awards - The Drowner was the first novel to win a Premier's literary award in every state, his novel Fortune won a National Book Council award and he received a Commmonwealth Writers Prize for the short story colllection The Bay of Contented Men. His books have also been adapted for the screen. Our Sunshine was made into the film Ned Kelly and both The Bodysurfers and The Shark Net - his memoir of growing up in Western Australia in the 1950s and 60s - became TV mini series. Robert Drewe begins his address at the festival with Tarzan of the Apes, which he found much more interesting than the children's books then on offer.

Robert Dessaix: Arabesques   Read Transcript

07/10/2008
After a chance visit to the castle where French writer André Gide spent his childhood, Robert Dessaix set off to visit the places where Gide lived out his unconventional ideas about love, sexuality and religion. Arabesques sees Dessaix journeying from Europe to the edge of the Sahara and features meditations on such varied subjects as why we travel, growing old and illicit passions.

Simon Winchester on Joseph Needham and the great secrets of China   Read Transcript

03/10/2008
Joseph Needham was a scientist, polyglot, traveller, diplomat, a socialist and a Christian, an exponent of free love, a nudist, a morris dancer and most of all he was passionate about China. As editor and co-author of Science and Civilisation in China, a massive, multi-volume study, he spent more than half a century collecting and compiling evidence that China was the birthplace of everything from chess to cartography, from the stirrup to the suspension bridge. Simon Winchester tells the story of Needham's life and work in Bomb, Book and Compass.

The legacy of Mahmoud Darwish   Read Transcript

02/10/2008
When Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish died in August three days of mourning were declared and Darwish was accorded the equivalent of a state funeral. Mahmoud Darwish published over thirty volumes of poetry and eight books of prose. His work won numerous awards and has been published in many languages, including Hebrew.

Junot Diaz gives thanks to literature

02/10/2008
Junot Diaz is author of the Pulitzer prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The story of a fat, nerdy boy, a migrant from the Dominican Republic, like Diaz himself, who now lives in the United States. Junot Diaz was invited to give the closing address at the Sydney Writers' Festival and gave a gracious, charming and thoughtful address in which he thanked the many people who contribute to the celebration of books and literature, from festival volunteers to readers and librarians. This is part of what he had to say.

Kate Grenville: The Lieutenant   Read Transcript

01/10/2008
In her new novel The Lieutenant Kate Grenville once again visits the period of white Australian settlement to create her characters Daniel Rooke, a First Fleet soldier and astronomer, and Tagaran, a young Aboriginal girl he befriends. Daniel Rooke is taken up with his own interests, often going off to his makeshift observatory where he can be alone with his thoughts. His interest in languages takes over when he makes contact with Tagaran and between them they try to make sense of the place they find themselves in, between cultures.

Pacifism and English Literature with R. S. White

30/09/2008
While war has been a permanent fixture of history, peace seems to exist more in our imagination than in reality. R.S. White, Professor of English at the University of Western Australia has looked at literature to see how peace has been imagined by writers from the Middle Ages to the present. He says that peace became part of the language of poetry in the 14th century, long before the anti-war poetry of the First World War.

Fine Just the Way It Is: Annie Proulx (review)   Read Transcript

30/09/2008
Three years after Annie Proulx's short story 'Brokeback Mountain' lit up the silver screen, and four since her previous book, she's back with another collection of short stories, Fine Just the Way It Is. Patricia Maunder saddles up for this Pulitzer Prize-winning author's latest look at the American Midwest, past and present, and soon finds herself touched by its relentless snow, dust and despair.

The Build Up -- crime fiction in the Top End

29/09/2008
Australian author Phillip Gwynne is best known for his young adult fiction, particularly Deadly Unna, a coming-of-age novel set in small-town South Australia about the friendship between a white kid called 'Blacky' and a black kid called 'Red' who play together on the local footy team. Deadly Unna won the Children's Book Council Book of the Year Award for Older Readers in 1999, and was made into a successful and controversial film, Australian Rules. But now Phillip Gwynne has branched into adult literature and crime fiction. His latest novel is set in the Top End during the steamy season before the big wet. It's called The Build Up and the main character is Dusty Buchanan.

Odysseys and nostalgia - Arnold Zable with Julian Burnside

26/09/2008
In his new book Sea of Many Returns Arnold Zable introduces a mythic element into the modern immigrant experience. This book is set in part on the Greek Island of Ithaca and it's a Homeric tale about emigration to Australia and the memories, people and history that trail in the wake of these journeys. At the Melbourne Writers' Festival, Arnold Zable speaks with his friend, Julian Burnside, barrister and refugee advocate, about his new book.

Christina Thompson's New Zealand love story

25/09/2008
Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of a book called Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: An Unlikely Love Story. She was for many years a postgraduate student and researcher in Australian universities and was also the editor of the Australian literary magazine Meanjin. 20 years ago she was on her way back to Australia after spending time with her family in Boston, and she went to New Zealand for a break. There she met a man called Seven, a Maori foundry worker, the seventh of ten children -- she married him and had three children. Her book is an exploration of their life together, Pacific literature and an actual Pacific man. And it's also a meditation on colonialism and the essence of difference.

The reading life of Anita Heiss

25/09/2008
From the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, Anita Heiss speaks about the books that have made a lasting impression on her and the authors who've inspired her. Anita Heiss is a novelist, poet, activist and social commentator who describes herself as 'a concrete Koori with a Westfield dreaming - a city chick whose idea of Survivor is a night in a caravan'. Her published works include the poetry collection Token Koori, Sacred Cows, a work of satirical social commentary, and the chick lit novel Not Meeting Mr Right. In 2003 she received an Australian Society of Authors medal for under 35s for her contribution to the Australian community and public life and in 2007 she won a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Deadly Award for outstanding achievement in literature.

John Marsden's Hamlet   Read Transcript

24/09/2008
Australian author John Marsden has created his own version of Hamlet, the ultimate story of revenge and betrayal. But his version is for teenagers. John Marsden's Hamlet is frustrated by sexual desire, the tyranny of the adult world and his own brand of teen angst. He wears black jeans and t-shirts and plays footie with his mates, but it's still set in Denmark and the ghost of his father still haunts him.

The Omega Force by Rick Moody (review)   Read Transcript

23/09/2008
Rick Moody has been described as having a prodigious gift for ventriloquism and while accolades for his writing seem to trail his every word, as we'll hear, not all critics sing his praises. Rick Moody's latest book The Omega Force is a collection of three stories. Kirsten Alexander found the collection patchy terrain.

Chris Cleave's Other Hand

23/09/2008
'You can't dance to current affairs,' says British writer Chris Cleave and it's this belief that inspires him to write, to populate the events that clutter the daily news and to give them an emotional landscape. Chris Cleave is not afraid to tackle large themes in his novels. His first book Incendiary was about a woman grieving the loss of her husband and son, killed in a fictional terrorist attack in England. Its official publication date was 7 July 2005, the day more than 50 people were killed by terrorist bombings in and around London. It might have put him off writing but didn't. Chris Cleave's new novel The Other Hand is another ambitious and complex book dealing with big issues such as refugees, globalisation, political violence and individual ethics.

On death row with Luke Davies   Read Transcript

22/09/2008
What do the condemned think about while they're on death row? This is one of the questions Luke Davies wanted to ask when he spent time with two men on death row at Bali's Kerobokan Prison, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. They are two of the 'Bali 9' who were arrested in 2005 and charged with drug trafficking. They have one more legal option to have their sentences reduced and their case is currently before the Supreme Court. Luke has made his name as a novelist, poet and screen-writer. This is his first foray into journalism. Luke Davies has written about his time at Kerobokan Prison in the essay 'The Penalty is Death' which is in the latest Monthly magazine.

Terry Pratchett - other realities   Read Transcript

19/09/2008
Terry Pratchett's Discworld arrived 25 years ago with the publication of The Colour of Magic in 1983. Since then he's written more than 30 novels in the Discworld series, as well as other fantasy and alternate-reality books. His other worlds have made Terry Pratchett an international bestseller as well as earning him an OBE for services to literature and a Carnegie Medal for his children's novel The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. At this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival Terry Pratchett talked about other realities and introduced his most recently published book Nation.

Nathalie Abi-Ezzi: A Girl Made of Dust

17/09/2008
Nathalie Abi-Ezzi spent the first eleven years of her life in Lebanon before her family moved to England in 1983. It's these early years of her life that provide the impetus for her novel A Girl Made of Dust. It's a story of a young girl, Ruba, who tries to hold her family together through sheer force of will as war and indiscriminate violence creep closer.

Posthumous publishing - Janet Frame's poetry

17/09/2008
New Zealand writer Janet Frame died in 2004 at 79 years of age. That, however, hasn't stopped the publication of 'new' work by Janet Frame. Two previously unpublished works, a novel and a collection of poetry, have recently been released. This raises all sorts of questions about posthumous publication of literary works, and about who decides what should or shouldn't be put in the public domain. One of the people given the job of managing the literary estate of Janet Frame is her niece, Pamela Gordon, who's in Australia for the local release of the new poetry collection, called The Goose Bath.

Richard Holmes: The Age of Wonder   Read Transcript

16/09/2008
The Age of Wonder is the title of literary biographer Richard Holmes' new book, subtitled How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Starting when the young Joseph Banks arrived in Tahiti in 1796 Richard Holmes tells us of the grand explorations and discoveries of the age, including a new planet, a new way of travelling and seeing the world by air, and a new way of looking at the make-up of matter itself. It was an age of wonder not only to those who worked in science but to the great writers and poets of the time such as Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

Christopher Kremmer on greed

12/09/2008
Christopher Kremmer, author of Bamboo Palace, The Carpet Wars and Inhaling the Mahatma, begins the 2008 Sydney PEN '3 Writers' series of talks with an address on the subject of greed. PEN is an international organisation that exists to highlight the plight of writers and journalists who are being persecuted because of their work. The organisation also works with writers to highlight wider injustices and inequities in society. It's with this in mind that Sydney PEN have used this series of talks to focus on greed, survival and courage. The second speaker in the series will be Melissa Lukashenko tackling the topic of survival and then Anna Funder on the subject of courage. All three talks will be published as an essay collection in the first half of 2009.

Patrick French on VS Naipaul   Read Transcript

11/09/2008
Patrick French has won awards for his biography of the explorer Francis Younghusband and for his writing on India. The World Is What It Is is his authorised biography of VS Naipaul, which reads like a novel in its arresting study of the man himself, like history as we move through Naipaul's life, and like a work of literary criticism in its examination of Naipaul's writing.

AJ Mackinnon's unlikely voyage   Read Transcript

10/09/2008
Jack de Crow is the name AJ Mackinnon gave to his eleven-foot dingy. He named it after a tame crow which would visit the school in England where he was teaching at the time. Sandy Mackinnon set off on his very own 'boys own adventure' in that tiny boat, known as a Mirror dingy. He sailed from the border of North Wales to the Black Sea. He recounts these tales in his book The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow. For The Book Show Pollyanna Sutton caught up with Sandy Mackinnon at the recent Byron Bay Writers' Festival.

On fragments and dust: Nicolas Rothwell   Read Transcript

10/09/2008
As a journalist Nicolas Rothwell has travelled to the Americas, Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In 2005 he was The Australian newspaper's correspondent in Iraq. He passed through the landscapes of a country at war and visited the ruins of past civilisations, such as the capital of Queen Zenobia. When he came back home to Darwin, he travelled again to the desert, to the Kimberley and Pilbara, which is a landscape he's been travelling through for many years. He has written about these desert journeys, and the thoughts they inspired, in an essay called 'On Fragments and Dust'.

Ukrainian satirist Andrey Kurkov   Read Transcript

09/09/2008
Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian writer of Russian extraction. His writing combines acute political observation, deep human understanding and a talent for black comedy. His novel The President's Last Love is about life in Ukraine before and after the Soviet union. It's the story of a young catering manager who reaches the top of the political tree almost by accident.

Anne Fine at the Edinburgh International Book Festival   Read Transcript

08/09/2008
English writer Anne Fine was the Children's Laureate a few years ago, but she also writes for adults. She calls her novels for adults sour comedies. At the Edinburgh International Book Festival she spoke to Ramona Koval about the latest of these, Fly In The Ointment.

Colm Toibin and Patrick McGrath   Read Transcript

05/09/2008
An entertaining pairing of two of the finest writers of fiction at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival -- Patrick McGrath and Colm Toibin. They talk to Ramona about mothers, martyrs and what to do if you're about to be burned at the stake.

Jackie Kay: Scottish poet, novelist and short-story writer   Read Transcript

04/09/2008
Jackie Kay's a captivating writer and a warm and funny presence. Born in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father she was adopted by a white couple at birth and brought up in Glasgow. The experience of being adopted by, and growing up with, a white family inspired her first collection of poetry The Adoption Papers. Her first novel, Trumpet, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and she has also written a much-admired short story collection, Wish I Was Here. In 2006 Jackie Kay received an MBE for services to literature. Her latest book is called Darling, a collection of new and selected poems.

Hanif Kureishi on writing, psychoanalysis and relationships   Read Transcript

03/09/2008
Hanif Kureishi is a very successful and multi-award winning writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, plays, non-fiction and essays. He spoke to Ramona Koval at the Edinburgh International Book Festival about his new novel Something To Tell You. In the book we meet the middle-aged Dr. Jamal Kahn, a Freudian psychoanalyst who tells us about his journey through 1970's London suburbia, his first love, his family, his history of fears and longings and his guilt about an incident that happened in his youth.

Anya Ulinich - Petropolis   Read Transcript

02/09/2008
Anya Ulinich's debut novel Petropolis is a satire about the parallels between the United States and Russia. Sasha Goldberg is part of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, except she knows nothing about Judaism, is half African and leaves Russia for the US as a mail-order bride, not really the sort of thing the intelligentsia are supposed to do.

Kate Mosse in conversation at the Melbourne Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

01/09/2008
Kate Mosse is the author of the blockbuster historical fantasies Labyrinth and Sepulchre, time slip novels in which contemporary characters find their lives entangled with figures from the past. Kate Mosse is also one of the founders of the Orange Prize for Fiction, a thirty thousand pound prize for a novel by a woman.

Germaine Greer on rage

29/08/2008
In her opening address at the 2008 Melbourne Writers' Festival Germaine Greer spoke about rage, which is also the subject of her recently published essay - On Rage. Please note that this broadcast is not available as a podcast.

Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins   Read Transcript

27/08/2008
New Zealand writer Emily Perkins's book Novel About My Wife is set in London, where the author lived for 10 years. It takes the point of view of scriptwriter Tom Stone, whose career has stalled and whose life doesn't match his middle-class aspirations. What we read is his account of the events that led up to his wife Anne's death. But he's also writing a novel about his wife, so it's a novel within a novel. Writing it is his way of coming to terms with Anne's absence and his way of reconstructing the events that led to her death. This is a mystery novel of sorts; Tom knows why Anne died, though he failed to see the warning signs but, as readers, we remain uncertain about the cause of her death -- was she mentally ill or was she really being stalked? Sarah L'Estrange spoke to novelist Emily Perkins for The Book Show. Emily Perkins begins by reading from the beginning of her book, Novel About my Wife.

Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review

27/08/2008
Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco has 30 000 books in his Milan appartment and another 20 000 volumes in his country manor. The author of Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose is a man of prodigious intellect, fluent in several languages, with an encylopedic knowledge of medieval history. So you'd never guess what il professore likes to watch on TV. He likes Starsky and Hutch - the clunky, at times slapstick 1970s police buddy drama featuring two badly dressed Califorian cops in need of a good haircut. Umberto Eco's taste in TV is one of the more trivial things to emerge from a long and fascinating interview with the author published in the current edition of the literary magazine The Paris Review. The latest issue also includes a moving recollection of a friendship by novelist and children's writer Paula Fox and the diary of fire lookout, who spends his summers watching for smoke a tower on top of a mountain in a New Mexico national park.

Augusten Burroughs: A Wolf at the Table   Read Transcript

26/08/2008
Augusten Burroughs made the terrible events of his adolesence funny in Running with Scissors. Now Burroughs has written another memoir, one that goes further back into his childhood to investigate his relationship with his father. It's a darker work called A Wolf at the Table.

Barry Maitland in conversation at the Melbourne Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

25/08/2008
Barry Maitland is known for his forensic police procedurals featuring the investigative pair of Detective Chief Inspector David Brock and Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla of Scotland Yard's Serious Crime Unit, but his latest work breaks the mould. The novel, called Bright Air, is set in Australia and, unlike his other work, it's written in the first person, making it a more personal and interior narrative that explores psychological conflicts along with investigating the crime.

Books for children   Read Transcript

22/08/2008
There's currently a major emphasis on getting children to read, engaging them in the written word through initiatives like premiers' reading challenges and Children's Book Week. Most of us who read for pleasure can name books and stories we loved when we were young, books that helped to shape our sense of identity and our sense of place, books that opened our minds to alternative worlds and new possibilities. Award-winning writer Sonya Hartnett, children's literature specialist Professor John Stevens and illustrator and author Tina Matthews discuss writing for children.

The be-bop of writing   Read Transcript

21/08/2008
For every style of jazz, whether it's trad, cool, be-bop or acid, there are probably as many literary responses to the music. There was F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in the Jazz Age of the 20s; in the 1960s Jack Kerouac experimented with spontaneous bop prose; and Toni Morrison's novel Jazz has elements of improvisation in its style of writing. Not surprisingly, these examples of the links between jazz and writing all come from the USA, but how strong are these connections in Australia? The National Jazz Writing Competition is trying to tap in to these links. It's the only competition of its kind in Australia, and in previous years it's celebrated the reviewing of jazz music reviews. This year, the competition asked for short stories -- for fictional responses to music. The winner of the award is being announced at the Melbourne Writers' Festival.

Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard

21/08/2008
Peter Stothard discusses three histories of women in the ancient world, a new edition of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, published fifty years after the first book Justine appeared, and the collected letters of writer Penelope Fitzgerald, who was in her sixties before her first book was published and who went on to win a Booker prize.

David Sedaris engulfed in flames   Read Transcript

20/08/2008
Self-deprecating writer David Sedaris was 'humorist of the year' in 2001 after his book Me Talk Pretty One Day received rave reviews. Sedaris has written six mostly autobiographical works. His latest is When You Are Engulfed in Flames. He is doing a tour of Australia and is a guest at this year's Melbourne Writers' Festival.

James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning (review)   Read Transcript

20/08/2008
Proving that there might be some truth in the cliche that any publicity is good publicity, the PR material attached to James Frey's new work Bright Shiny Morning boldly claims that NOTHING IN THIS BOOK SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ACCURATE OR RELIABLE. That's a direct quote -- both from the first page of the book and the postcard that came with the review copy. Susan Humphries examines Frey's unabashed manoeuvre into the world of fiction for The Book Show.

The role of the literary critic - Daniel Mendelsohn   Read Transcript

19/08/2008
This year's Sydney Jewish Writers' Festival has attracted a number of prominent international guests, including leading US writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn. Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of three books, including The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million in which he investigates the story of what happened to his family during World War Two. He is also a professor of humanities at Bard College and a leading critic, writing regularly for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review. His latest book, just published in the US and due for release here in Australia in a matter of weeks, is a collection of his essays called How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken.

Amanda Curtin's new novel The Sinkings   Read Transcript

18/08/2008
Western Australian writer Amanda Curtin's new novel The Sinkings deals with the 19th century murder of an ex-convict called Little Jock, who had lived his life as a man, but was found in death to have been a woman. Amanda Curtin uses this story to traverse some difficult territory, exploring the experience of being neither man nor woman, of being born of indeterminate gender and what that might mean, not just for a child, but also for a mother.

Emerging writers - Nathan Curnow's Ghost Poetry

18/08/2008
If you go to Port Arthur in Tasmania there's a display of photos at the entrance that have been sent in by visitors to the prison. These are strange images that are hard to explain -- like a shadow where none should be -- is it a trick of the light, or a ghost captured on film? Many visitors experience Port Arthur as spooky -- as if the suffering of its inmates has seeped into the stone walls -- as if the spirits of former inmates remain trapped there in the ruins. There are other sites like this in Australia which have a traumatic past. Nathan Curnow summoned his courage to visit ten of Australia's haunted places to write poetry inspired by their histories of sorrow, murder and intrigue. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Nathan Curnow for our Emerging Writers Series, and he explained how his Ghost Poetry Project came about.

Beyond rhyme - the art of writing poetry   Read Transcript

14/08/2008
If you ask children what makes something a poem, the chances are they'll tell you that poetry rhymes. That's not necessarily the case of course, but if a piece of writing rhymes then we do tend to call it poetry. So what is the place of rhyme in poems? And what is the relationship between rhyme and other features of poetry, like rhythm? These are questions that interest the noted US poet Susan Stewart, who is also a professor of English at Princeton University.

Writers as Readers: Samuel Wagan Watson   Read Transcript

13/08/2008
At this year's Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors gave us a tour of their bookshelves. On The Book Show we've heard from Christos Tsiolkas, Luke Davies and Helen Garner. Today Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson discusses his influences, not so much from his bookshelves as from his CD rack. Samuel Wagan Watson grew up in a political household during the Bjelke-Petersen years in Queensland. His father, Sam Watson, was a prominent Aboriginal activist. The young Samuel listened to Janis Joplin and the Doobie Brothers, but when he said he wanted to be a rock star, his father was not impressed. Samuel Wagan Watson never fulfilled his musical dreams, but turned his lyrical gifts to poetry. In 2005 he won the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for Poetry for his collection Smoke Encrypted Whispers.

Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday   Read Transcript

13/08/2008
Gordon Burn is the author of Born Yesterday which takes the news events of 2007 in the UK and constructs them into a narrative or, as he calls it, it's 'the news as a novel'. But is this a novel or literary non-fiction?

Car Lovers with John Dale and Tony Davis

12/08/2008
The road trip is a strong theme in Australian film but what about in our writing? Car Lovers: Twelve Australian Writers on Four Wheels is a collection of new writing about our relationship to cars as vehicles of memory, grief and freedom. Writers like Peter Carey and Debra Adelaide contributed their stories about cars to this collection.

Steven Isserlis - cellist and children's book writer   Read Transcript

11/08/2008
Many music lovers regard Englishman Steven Isserlis as the world's greatest living cellist, and his passion for music extends beyond performances and recordings. He's written two very entertaining books for children, telling the stories of the great composers, and giving some insight into the making of some of the most beautiful music that we know today. His books—Why Beethoven Threw the Stew and Why Handel Waggled His Wig—exhibit an appealing playfulness in a world where classical music is often taken so seriously that it becomes daunting. Steven Isserlis clearly likes his subjects. Steven is currently touring Australia with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Michael Shirrefs asked him if understanding the composers as real, three-dimensional people is important to him as a performer.

Southern Lands through French Eyes   Read Transcript

11/08/2008
Josephine Bonaparte is said to have kept kangaroos and emus in her garden after the 19th century French expedition of Nicholas Baudin and Francois Peron returned from Australia. At the time, an Atlas about this voyage was also created and the Atlas has just been published in facsimilie for the first time in Australia by the Friends of the State Library of South Australia.

Fay Weldon: Edinburgh International Book Festival (repeat)

07/08/2008
Since Fay Weldon's Down Among the Women, written in the 1970s, she has written about subjects from cloning to cuckolding. 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. It's, in a sense, again 'down among the women', but this time the women are high achievers -- mortgage brokers, judges, and even journalists. (First broadcast 6/9/2007)

Inside the PR industry with Bob Burton (repeat)

06/08/2008
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. (First broadcast 19/11/07)

Alex Miller's Landscape of Farewell (repeat)   Read Transcript

06/08/2008
Alex Miller first won the Miles Franklin Award in 1993 with his book The Ancestor Game and then again in 2003 with Journey To The Stone Country. His novel Landscape of Farewell is a profound and moving story about the land, the past, exile and acceptance. It builds on the subject matter of Journey To The Stone Country. Ramona Koval speaks to Alex Miller. (First broadcast 19/11/2007)

Michael Chabon: swashbuckling gentleman of the road (repeat)   Read Transcript

05/08/2008
You might have read Michael Chabon's book The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It's a hard boiled detective story in the style of Raymond Chandler set in an alternative world -- what if Israel did not exist and instead millions of European Jewish refugees took shelter in Alaska? It became a New York Times bestseller and the National Book Critics Circle in America named it number three in their five top fiction books of 2007. Michael Chabon has written other acclaimed novels and short stories, including his award winning first young adult novel, Summerland. He's also written articles, essays, and a number of screenplays and shares a story credit for the film Spiderman 2. In 2005, he edited the Best American Short Stories yearly anthology. The extremely gifted and flexible Michael Chabon speaks to Ramona Koval about his swashbuckling adventure novel, Gentlemen Of The Road, which started as a serial in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. (First broadcast 5/12/2007)

Nicholas Shakespeare's Secrets of the Sea (repeat)   Read Transcript

04/08/2008
Secrets of the Sea is set in a fictional, decaying seaside town in south east Tasmania called Wellington Point. It's where Alex Dove returns from England after his parents die in a car accident. He returns to a large, unprofitable farm and a dusty collection of ships in bottles. There, he meets Merridy, who has her own experience of tragedy -- her brother disappeared as a child. The two marry, they work the land, and Merridy establishes an oyster hatchery, but they are unable to have a child. They drift a little until a storm at sea causes them to give shelter to a strange young man called Kish. Ramona Koval speaks to Nicholas Shakespeare about Secrets of the Sea and their conversation begins with a reading from the book. (First broadcast 4/10/2007)

Jay Parini on Why Poetry Matters   Read Transcript

31/07/2008
The poets Scott, Byron and Longfellow were best sellers in their time, but since then, the popularity of poetry has shrunk. In his new book Why Poetry Matters Jay Parini investigates why the status of poetry has fallen and how to prop it up.

Writers as readers: Helen Garner   Read Transcript

30/07/2008
At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them. This week we hear from Helen Garner. Helen Garner's award-winning books include novels, short-stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction, such as The First Stone (1995) and Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004). Her new book is The Spare Room, her first novel in 15 years.

Terry Castle on female critics - an endangered species?   Read Transcript

30/07/2008
Virginia Woolf said there's no such thing as the female sentence. But is there a female critical point of view? In answer to this, perhaps a bit tongue in cheek, Terry Castle says the female critic is an endangered species and that no one really likes her. Terry Castle is a professor of English at Stanford University, holding the Walter A. Haas chair. She's a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times Book Review with her humorous, penetrating, intelligent and personal reviews. She's the author of many books including Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays On Women, Sex, And Writing and The Literature of Lesbianism. Terry Castle's been in Australia for the Australasian Association for Literature conference on Literature and History.

James Lee Burke on Jesus Out to Sea   Read Transcript

29/07/2008
American writer James Lee Burke is perhaps best known for the series of crime novels featuring his character Detective Dave Robicheaux. But today Ramona Koval speaks with him about his collection of short stories Jesus Out To Sea. Born in Houston Texas in 1936, James Lee Burke grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf coast. He has worked as a rancher, an English lecturer, a labourer on offshore oil rigs, a land surveyor, a social worker in Los Angeles, a clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, an instructor in the US Job Corps and a newspaper reporter. All of which prepared him mighty well for writing the stories in this collection. And when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, that tragic event inspired other stories, stories that seem to have a kind of rage bubbling underneath them. James Lee Burke joins Ramona Koval from his home in Montana.

Emerging writers: Kate McLennan   Read Transcript

29/07/2008
How do you make a name for yourself in the cut-throat comedy circuit? To get a break, Kate McLennan recommends writing and acting in your own work. She won best newcomer award in 2006 at the Melbourne Fringe for her one woman character comedy Debutante Diaries, and she's since performed it in Edinburgh, and at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. The idea for the show, though, was planted when she was in high school. For our Emerging Writers Series, the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Kate McLennan, who starts by explaining how the Debutante Diaries came about.

Luc Sante: devoured by his book collection   Read Transcript

28/07/2008
There have been many rules put forward about the sorts of books that should be in a home library but Luc Sante doesn't follow book collecting etiquette. His passion for books goes beyond how they look and feel and he describes his far ranging book collection—from alien abductions to minor German Romantic works—as a 'hive of activity, abuzz with rhythms and images and ideas'. Luc Sante is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and he's written about what he collects and why he collects in The Wall Street Journal in an article called 'The Book Collection That Devoured My Life'.

Crafting murder: Peter Temple + Michael Robotham   Read Transcript

25/07/2008
Last weekend, the inaugural Crime and Justice Festival was being held at the old Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, bringing together writers, lawyers, social commentators and luminaries from the judiciary to look at writing about justice, human rights and (of course) crime fiction. Peter Temple won a Ned Kelly award in 1997 for his first novel, Bad Debts. He's subsequently won four more Ned Kelly awards, the most recent of these being for the much acclaimed novel The Broken Shore, which also went on to win the ultimate plaudit for crime fiction, the international Gold Dagger Award now known as the Duncan Lawrie Dagger. Michael Robotham started his literary life as a ghost-writer, lending his writing skills to politicians, pop stars and all manner of celebrities. His first novel (under his own name) was called Suspect, and it achieved an enormous amount of attention around the world. Since then, his books Lost, The Night Ferry and most recently Shatter, have reinforced his reputation as one of the best architects of the psychological thriller. Peter and Michael, along with the literary editor of The Age Jason Steger, talk about their unplanned journeys into the crime genre, and the joys and agonies of wrestling a suspenseful story into being. Another thing that these two writers have in common is that they both started out as journalists. And so Jason Steger started by asking Peter Temple what impact journalism has had on his writing.

Writers as readers: Luke Davies   Read Transcript

23/07/2008
At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them. Luke Davies is a novelist, poet and screenwriter currently trying his luck in LA. He's the author of the recently published God of Speed and his book Candy was made into a film. It focuses on young lovers who are in a spiral of heroin addiction. Luke Davies was himself an addict 20 years ago and in this talk he guides us through the books that penetrated his drug induced haze and re-introduced him to the world of emotions and feeling.

The end of the golden age of biography   Read Transcript

23/07/2008
Biographer Kathryn Hughes asks whether it is the end of the golden age of biography because all the most interesting subjects have already been written into the history books.

A Paddock in his Head by Brendan Ryan (review)   Read Transcript

23/07/2008
Australian poet Brendan Ryan's work is informed by his experience of growing up on a dairy farm in the 1960s and '70s. His first collection, Why I Am Not a Farmer, was published in 2000. Since then his poems have appeared in a number of journals including Best Australian Poetry 2006. Brendan Ryan's latest book, A Paddock in his Head, has poems about the inner suburbs, the Bellarine Peninsula, and travelling overseas, but the central theme is his family's farm. It's reviewed for The Book Show by Geoff Page.

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon   Read Transcript

18/07/2008
Born in 1964, Aleksandar Hemon grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and became a journalist. In 1992 he travelled to America on a US-sponsored goodwill tour. His home city came under siege while he was in Chicago, where he stayed as a refugee. After a wide variety of low level, minimum wage jobs, he started writing in his second language, English, in 1995. His acclaimed collection of stories The Question of Bruno provoked comparisons with Conrad, Nabokov and Kundera when it appeared in 2000 and won several awards. His new book is The Lazarus Project. Aleksandar Hemon won one of the American MacArthur Foundation's famed 'genius grants' in 2004 to fund research for the book which is an exploration of immigration and identity.

Emerging writers: Kate Mulvany

16/07/2008
Earlier this year the Emerging Writers' Festival promoted itself by saying it presents the best Australian writers you haven't heard of...yet. One of the writers at the festival was actor and playwright Kate Mulvany. She won the 2004 Philip Parsons Young Playwright's Award and her most recent play is called The Seed. This play began as a novel 10 years ago but became a play, she talks about this process and how it ended up on the stage.

Spurious and bogus Botany Bay literature

14/07/2008
Bogus stories about imaginary voyages to the Antipodes were popular in Britain in the 18th century. And the most popular story from this time was A Voyage to New South Wales -- later just Voyage -- and its author was celebrity convict George Barrington, an elegantly dressed pickpocket who moved in exalted circles and who was sentenced to transportation to Australia in 1790. Charles Dickens, Walter Scott and Edgar Allan Poe had heard of him, but he didn't actually write a word of these popular accounts of coming to Australia. Nathan Garvey has been following the trail of where these bogus stories came from.

Ali Alizadeh - The New Angel   Read Transcript

14/07/2008
Imagine dreading having to sit a test at school the next day, then waking up in the morning to find all your prayers have been answered: your school has been destroyed in an air attack. This happened both to Iranian-born Australian author Ali Alizadeh and Bahram, the main character in his novel The New Angel. It's the story of a young boy growing up in Tehran after the Iranian Islamic Revolution and in the midst of the bloody Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and then having to deal with a new world when his family moves to Australia.

Writing, procrastination and creativity   Read Transcript

11/07/2008
Today we ride the pendulum of creativity that swings between writer's block and hypergraphia. Writer's block and procrastination have been the trusty companions of writers from Joseph Conrad to Franz Kafka. And then some writers suffered from hypergraphia, like Dostoevsky, who for his suffering wrote 19 novels as well as other works. But for other writers like John Updike, writer's block is as foreign as an empty page. Geoff Dyer and Alice Flaherty have both swung on this pendulum. Geoff Dyer set out to write a serious study of his literary idol DH Lawrence but instead he ended up writing Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of DH Lawrence which is an exhilarating and excruciating journey through the twists and turns of his procrastination about not writing about DH Lawrence. Alice Flaherty is a neurologist who has written a book that investigates the link between creativity, the brain and emotion. It's called The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writers Block and the Creative Brain.

Poetry and politics in Joel Deane's Magisterium   Read Transcript

10/07/2008
Joel Deane lives his life alternately as a poet and as a political speechwriter. He talks to writer Michael Gurr about his latest collection of poetry, Magisterium, where these two worlds collide.

Amy Hempel - Dog of the Marriage   Read Transcript

09/07/2008
Amy Hempel is celebrated all over the world as a short story writer who is among the best of the best. In her latest collection of short stories Dog of the Marriage Amy Hempel writes about the misfortunes and moments of revelation in people's marriages and in their lives.

Standard Operating Procedure - Philip Gourevitch   Read Transcript

08/07/2008
Philip Gourevitch was covering the 2004 presidential election for the New Yorker magazine in the year the Abu Ghraib photographs came out showing the abuse of prisoners by American soldiers. He expected that this would change the nature of the conversation about America's conduct of the Iraq war. This didn't happen and ultimately only a handful of low-ranking soldiers were convicted of abusing prisoners. When filmmaker Errol Morris began to send him transcripts of interviews he had done with some of those soldiers Philip Gourevitch decided to work on a book with Morris looking at who and what was hidden by the framing. The book, like the film, is called Standard Operating Procedure.

Writing for children without a message - Kim Kane   Read Transcript

07/07/2008
Kim Kane says that while she doesn't like chickens or gumboots, which are apparently both prerequisites for being a children's writer, she does like children and her debut novel has just come out, it's called Pip: The Story of Olive.

Memoir sojourn -- life writing in Paris   Read Transcript

07/07/2008
The schedule for one memoir writing workshop in Paris goes something like this: day one—arrive, day two—explore the local environs, day three—learn about literary Paris, and on the fourth day learn to write your own memoir. For the next two weeks do workshops, indulge in coffee and cake from the local boulangerie and, of course, write. Patti Miller is the tour leader for the University of Sydney's Writing in Paris: Memoir Sojourn that combines writing workshops with travel. Pamela Bradley went to Paris on a writing sojourn and she's recently published her own memoir Nefertiti Street. They give some tips about writing holidays.

Richard Wright: The Life and Times

03/07/2008
In the year that marks the centenary of his birth, Richard Wright's biographer Hazel Rowley talks about the achievements of this African-American author who wrote powerful and at times controversial novels, short stories, poetry and non-fiction and who achieved a number of firsts: the first bestselling black American writer; the first black man to buy a house in Greenwich Village; the first African-American writer to leave for Paris after World War 2; the first black American writer to star in a movie based on his own novel.

Merlinda Bobis's message for adults   Read Transcript

02/07/2008
In her second novel The Solemn Lantern Maker, poet and playwright Merlinda Bobis takes the reader to the shanty towns that populate the streets of Manilla in the Philippines. She tells the story from the perspective of a child, Noland, who is mute and sells lanterns at a busy intersection in Manilla. He rescues an American woman when she's caught in the cross-fire of a drive-by shooting, and takes her to his hut in the slums where his mother tends to her. He is then implicated in what's thought to be a terrorist abduction of the tourist. The story shows the vulnerablilty of street children in the Philippines to abuses of power—especially when they have no voice. Merlinda Bobis dedicates this book to the children who are like the characters in her novel, and says it's a book with a message for adults.

Lapham's Quarterly: Book of Nature

02/07/2008
From Adolf Hitler's affection for animals to Rachel Carson's warning about dangerous chemicals to Walt Whitman's ode to the city, the latest Lapham's Quarterly charts the rocky terrain of our dealings with nature. The editor, Lewis Lapham, excavates the relationship between poetry, nature, morality and the future of the planet.

Cardigan drama or cutting edge? Australian political theatre   Read Transcript

01/07/2008
Playwright Louis Nowra describes some political theatre as 'cardigan dramas' and says that rather than breaking boundaries it has become conformist. This was his assessment after reading Hilary Glow's book on the state of political theatre in Australia called Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda. So what is the state of political theatre in Australia?

Richard Mason's new novel The Lighted Rooms

01/07/2008
Contemporary writer Richard Mason is what's known as a publishing phenomenon. In 1999 his first novel The Drowning People was bought for a large sum, became an international bestseller and won the Italian equivalent of the Booker prize while he was still a student at Oxford University. The amount of attention he received after the book's publication was the beginning of a complicated journey that he says involved some very high points, very low points, two panic attacks and a lot of learning. He also wrote two more novels. The most recent, The Lighted Rooms, is about to be released in Australia.

Neil Gaiman and the graphic novel   Read Transcript

29/06/2008
Neil Gaiman is one of the creators of the graphic novel. The English writer has been crossing media forms for decades and has developed a reputation as a trailblazer. He's the first to acknowledge that this accolade is usually the result of successful collaborations with illustrators, film directors and other writers. Neil Gaiman has written fantasy, horror, and high-tech stories for adults, young adults and children. Sometimes it's hard to know which book is intended for which audience - and he likes it that way.

Imagining Brisbane -- Simon Cleary   Read Transcript

25/06/2008
Simon Cleary's debut novel is The Comfort of Figs. It's a creation story about Brisbane and the construction of the Story Bridge in the 1930s. But at its heart it's about the rift between a father who built that bridge and a son who is obsessive about planting fig trees.

The Anatomist   Read Transcript

24/06/2008
One of the most famous books ever produced is the medical text known as Gray's Anatomy, published 150 years ago. In his book The Anatomist, science writer Bill Hayes investigates the lives of the two men behind the creation of this classic, the surgeon Henry Gray and his colleague Henry Vandyke Carter, who was responsible for the drawings.

Cover design -- Meanjin

24/06/2008
The discovery of a cupboard full of gems from another world is reminiscent of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from CS Lewis's Narnia series. Sophie Cunningham recently had a 'Narnia moment' when she opened a stairwell cupboard at the old Meanjin office. Inside were 68 years worth of past Meanjinjournals all stacked up in rows. The first Meanjin under her editorial guidance has come out. Sophie Cunningham said that opening that cupboard was like opening a door on the history of Australian book design, and this Meanjin has a feature on cover design. It is, of course, destined to join those towering columns of history too.

Miles Franklin Award winner 2008 - Steven Carroll   Read Transcript

20/06/2008
Steven Carroll has won this year's Miles Franklin award for his novel The Time We Have Taken, the third book in a series chronicling the life of a family in an emerging Melbourne suburb. The series begins in the 1950s, with The Art of the Engine Driver, moves into the 60s with The Gift of Speed, and lands in the 70s with The Time We Have Taken. The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown interviewed Steven Carroll in 2007. Find transcript and audio here.

The future of the Miles Franklin   Read Transcript

20/06/2008
Literary critic Geordie Williamson reflects on the impact of the Miles Franklin award on Australian literature in its 51-year history. He says that a part of Miles Franklin's dream for this award remains unrealised. In an article in The Australian he said he'd like to see the past winners reprinted before the close of the award's 51st year.

Queen of the Wits   Read Transcript

19/06/2008
Who was Laetitia Pilkington? The 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift called her 'the most profligate whore in either Kingdom'. This was after he had once treated her as his protege. After such a public dumping, Mrs Pilkington had nothing to lose, and turned her own savage pen on her erstwhile mentor -- her memoir provides insights into Swift's strange behaviour. Norma Clarke has written a biography of the fascinating Mrs Pilkington called Queen of the Wits.

Nury Vittachi - Asia Literary Review update

19/06/2008
Nuri Vittachi, comic author and founding editor of the Asia Literary Review, talks about various happenings around the region -- an edible books festival in Hong Kong, a lucrative new Asia-Australia book prize and a mass gathering of authors in New Delhi. These events have one thing in common and that's Nuri Vittachi himself -- he's got a finger in every literary prize.

EW Cole and the Cole's Funny Picture Books   Read Transcript

18/06/2008
A treasured reading memory for many Australians will be Cole's Funny Picture Books -- full of pictures and puzzles and limericks and optical illusions and strange, idealistic little blurbs about life, the universe, and everything. I suspect that, as children, we probably looked at the pictures and puzzles more than we read the text -- which by today's children's books standards is pretty dense. And at the time I certainly knew little about the books' creator, EW Cole. Edward Cole was an extraordinarily skilled entrepreneur, though not to be confused with the storekeeper, businessman and philanthropist GJ Coles. Edward Cole did not sell groceries, he sold books, and he was way ahead of his time understanding the value of publicity, advertising and branding. He drew huge crowds into his Bourke Street emporium, Cole's Book Arcade. And Cole was also an idealist with a Utopian vision of how wonderful the world would be in the year 2000. Lisa Lang has researched the story of the marvelous EW Cole and has written a book about him called Chasing the Rainbow.

The perils of publishing eccentric fiction   Read Transcript

17/06/2008
What would you do if you received a rejection letter for your novel that said, 'It's very hard to make a definite assessment of this book'? Wayne Macauley went down to the local library, photocopied it, enlarged it and stuck the phrase on his wall as a source of inspiration. It took Wayne Macauley 13 years to get his first novel into print. After countless rejections by the big publishing houses Blueprints for a Barbed Wire Canoe was finally accepted by a small independent outfit called Black Pepper. The novel then made it on to the reading list for Year 12 English, and quickly went to a second edition. Wayne Macauley has written up this experience in the journal Meanjin and talks about his journey to being published. He has some suggestions for promoting self-publishing.

Growing up Asian in Australia   Read Transcript

15/06/2008
When she was growing up, Alice Pung says she was called a 'powerpoint', a derogatory term for Asian people in Australia. Alice Pung and Shalini Akhil break through the stereotypes in this discussion of Growing up Asian in Australia, a collection of accounts about mateship, battlers, leaving home and being 'unAustralian'.

David Guterson's The Other   Read Transcript

15/06/2008
Author of Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson, talks about his latest book The Other. It's the story of a friendship between two men from very different backgrounds. The narrator, Neil Countryman, comes from blue collar stock and he's the first in his family to go to college. His friend, John William Barry, is from the opposite end of the social spectrum. The Barry family tree is firmly rooted in the pioneer history of Washington State, its branches laden with former governors, bankers and money. Over time the friends choose different paths.

Writing for interactive games - Matt Costello

15/06/2008
From the humble beginnings of Space Invaders and Pacman, computer games have become an enormous industry, with some video games earning more money than the films they're based on. Because it's a growing industry and potentially lucrative business, gaming has been attracting the attention of writers who want to expand the storytelling side of the industry. Matt Costello is a novelist who's authored TV scripts -- and he's a computer game writer. He's written for the games Just Cause (based on the US invasion of Panama), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End -- linked into the Johnny Depp movie of the same name, and the popular shooter game Doom 3. Set on Mars, Doom 3 is a science-fiction horror game. The player -- that's you -- is a marine with the Union Aerospace Corporation research centre, who fights an invasion of demons and a demented doctor who's turned to the dark side. At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival, The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Matt Costello about writing for games.

David Guterson's The Other   Read Transcript

12/06/2008
Author of Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson, talks about his latest book The Other. It's the story of a friendship between two men from very different backgrounds. The narrator, Neil Countryman, comes from blue collar stock and he's the first in his family to go to college. His friend, John William Barry, is from the opposite end of the social spectrum. The Barry family tree is firmly rooted in the pioneer history of Washington State, its branches laden with former governors, bankers and money. Over time the friends choose different paths.

Writing for interactive games - Matt Costello

12/06/2008
From the humble beginnings of Space Invaders and Pacman, computer games have become an enormous industry, with some video games earning more money than the films they're based on. Because it's a growing industry and potentially lucrative business, gaming has been attracting the attention of writers who want to expand the storytelling side of the industry. Matt Costello is a novelist who's authored TV scripts -- and he's a computer game writer. He's written for the games Just Cause (based on the US invasion of Panama), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End -- linked into the Johnny Depp movie of the same name, and the popular shooter game Doom 3. Set on Mars, Doom 3 is a science-fiction horror game. The player -- that's you -- is a marine with the Union Aerospace Corporation research centre, who fights an invasion of demons and a demented doctor who's turned to the dark side. At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival, The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Matt Costello about writing for games.

Peter Ho Davies - The Welsh Girl   Read Transcript

11/06/2008
Peter Ho Davies is a contemporary author who came to fame as a writer of short stories. His two collections of stories The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love won several prizes, including The New York Times Notable Book of the year. His first novel The Welsh Girl is set in the final months of the Second World War. The book explores the convergence and limits of love and obligation and was listed for the Man Booker prize. Born in England and educated in the UK and the US, Peter Ho Davies is currently the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

Growing up Asian in Australia

11/06/2008
When she was growing up, Alice Pung says she was called a 'powerpoint', a derogatory term for Asian people in Australia. Alice Pung and Shalini Akhil breakthrough the stereotypes in this discussion of Growing up Asian in Australia, a collection of accounts about mateship, battlers, leaving home and being 'unAustralian'.

Julia Leigh's Disquiet   Read Transcript

10/06/2008
In 1999, Australian author Julia Leigh won international praise for her first novel, The Hunter, the story of mercenary sent to the Tasmanian wilderness by a multinational biotech company to track down and kill the last Tasmanian tiger, in order to harvest its genetic material. Leigh was named by The Observer as one of the novelists to watch in the 21st Century, but it's taken nine years for her second novel to appear called Disquiet. Disquiet is the story of a woman returning after to the family chateau in France after a long absence in Australia. She carries the scars of a failed and brutal marriage and is accompanied by her two children, who've never before met their French relatives. Julia Leigh's two novels, The Hunter and Disquiet, are very different stories - and yet there are some key similarities between them.

Joseph Heller, the late American author of Catch 22   Read Transcript

09/06/2008
Today, from the archives of an earlier Radio National program, Books & Writing, a conversation that Ramona Koval had with the late, great American novelist and memoirist Joseph Heller. Heller was a master of the absurd, so much so that the title of his first novel and most famous book Catch 22 has entered the English language as the expression for an absurd and illogical concept. You might remember when Heller's hero, Yossarian, is asked to fly on more dangerous World War Two bombing missions, the only way to get out of doing so is to plead insanity. But if you're insane, you wouldn't want to stop flying, so you must be sane to want to stop, in which case you have to keep flying. That's 'Catch 22'. The book is now considered a classic, and Heller went on to write six more darkly comic novels, including Closing Time, which charts the progress of Yossarian and the evil Milo Minderbinder and others in the cast of the first novel as they make their way in the inferno that is post-war America. In his memoir, Now and Then, you can read about many of the locations that have found their way into Heller's fiction, especially Coney Island, the place where Heller grew up and had so many of his formative experiences. It was 1998, a year before his death, when Ramona spoke to Joseph Heller in his upper West Side Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park and he was, at 75, glossily handsome and charming and ready to talk about his writing life. Ramona asked him first if he enjoyed the fact that the expression 'Catch 22' had well and truly been absorbed into the wider lexicon, as a term synonymous with absurdity and a sort of tail-chasing illogicality?

Anne Enright in conversation at the Sydney Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

08/06/2008
Anne Enright's short stories make you sigh when you finish them, and each one delivers you to a place you haven't been before -- to a point of view that you may not have considered before. And of course there's her marvellous novel The Gathering, the story of the nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan, and the history that made them what they were. Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for this novel. She was educated in English and Philosophy and was a student of the famed University of East Anglia's creative writing course, taught by novelist, critic and teacher Malcolm Bradbury and the remarkable Angela Carter. She's been a television producer and has written opinion pieces for newspapers, and of course she's now a rightly celebrated novelist and essayist. Before Anne Enright spoke to Ramona Koval last Thursday evening, in Sydney's Recital Hall at Angel Place, she began with a reading from her Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering.

Neil Gaiman and the graphic novel   Read Transcript

04/06/2008
Neil Gaiman has been described as 'the father of the graphic novel'. The English writer, who's been crossing media forms for decades, has certainly developed an enviable reputation as a trailblazer, but he's the first to acknowledge that this accolade is usually the product of wonderful collaborations -- with illustrators and film directors and even other writers, like Terry Pratchett. Neil Gaiman has written fantasy, horror, and high-tech stories for adults, young adults and children -- and sometimes it's hard to know which book is intended for which audience -- he likes it that way. His literary life started as an enduring collaboration with artist Dave McKean, but Neil seems unable to stay still, jumping between different forms and different media because he never wants to repeat himself, or try to compete, in any conventional way, with 3,000 years of traditional storytelling. Michael Shirrefs spoke to Neil Gaiman during his recent trip to Australia and asked him why he was always taking on new styles and new problems.

Not Dark Yet: Reading and Seeing   Read Transcript

03/06/2008
While reading The Asiatics by Frederic Prokosch, David Walker noticed the lines on the page wobble. This was the first sign of macular degeneration of his retina and he is now legally blind. As an avid collector and reader of books, David Walker talks about his relationship to books and reading as a result of losing his vision.

How did Winnie the Pooh get its name?   Read Transcript

02/06/2008
How did those charming stories called Winnie the Pooh come to have this particular name? In his collection Why Not Catch 21? Gary Dexter charts the stories behind the titles of many popular, controversial and important books. Gary Dexter says the background story of the title of AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh involves a real life bear in London Zoo during World War One, and a swan called Pooh.

Luke Davies and The God of Speed   Read Transcript

01/06/2008
Howard Hughes had everything -- money, fame, power -- but by the end of his life he was consumed by drug addiction and an obsession with germs that left him confined to a blacked-out hotel room. This is the period in which poet, novelist and screenwriter Luke Davies sets his new novel The God of Speed, in which he explores the decayed mind of this once famous man.

Shaun Tan - Tales from Outer Suburbia   Read Transcript

29/05/2008
Shaun Tan has done much to propel the graphic novel into the mainstream with his exquisitely illustrated stories -- books like The Lost Thing and The Red Tree -- which told stories with a diverse palette of drawing styles. But it was his last book, The Arrival, a wordless allegory of the migrant experience, that has truly set him apart. That book won him the 2007 World Fantasy Award for Best Artist, the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Book of the Year (not bad for a work without text), and this year he's won the French Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Best Comic Book and has been nominated for two Hugo Awards. His latest is a collection of short stories called Tales from Outer Suburbia; pictures with words this time. Before speaking to Michael Shirrefs, here's Shaun Tan reading the first story from his collection: 'The Water Buffalo'.

Writings on Calcutta with Amit Chaudhuri

29/05/2008
While it may have changed its name to Kolkata, the Calcutta of Amit Chaudhuri's childhood has influenced his writing and sense of self. The city has also been the home of other famous Indian writers. The West Bengal city of Calcutta is the literary home of the giant of Indian writing Rabindranath Tagore. But it's with the literary successors of this icon that Amit Chaudhuri as novelist, essayist and musician finds a sense of comradeship -- with their sense of exile as migrants, foreigners and visitors in this city which is a seething, cosmopolitan metropolis. Amit Chaudhuri has written about the contribution of writers to the aesthetic of Calcutta in a May edition of the Times Literary Supplement. It is an extract from an anthology he's edited on Calcutta's literary heritage which is coming out later in the year, called Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta.

Fiona Capp - Musk & Byrne   Read Transcript

28/05/2008
The defiant figure of the female outlaw does not dominate stories of early Australia. Instead, we have the blokey Ned Kelly and his crew populating the mythological landscape with tales of daring bushrangers. But Australian writer Fiona Capp has imagined a story that blends her own family's journey to the Victorian goldfields in the late 1860s with a fictional story of a female outlaw - Jemma Musk. She's an artist and an independent woman who challenges the moral code of the small town she lives in. Fiona Capp has written two novels - Night Surfing and Last of the Sane Days - but she's also written a memoir called That Oceanic Feeling. So in her latest novel, she brings these two worlds together: her family history and the imagined landscape of fiction. At the Sydney Writers Festival, Fiona Capp spoke to the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange about her novel Musk and Byrne. Fiona begins by recounting the fantastic journey that forms the background to this novel - that of her great-great grandfather who travelled from Switzerland to Australia with his herd of cattle.

How the novel 1984 got its name

28/05/2008
In his collection Why Not Catch 21 - The Stories Behind the Titles, Gary Dexter has compiled the stories of how our favourite works ended up with their names. While George Orwell was writing what is now the classic 1984 his working title for the book was The Last Man in Europe? Gary Dexter explains how Orwell settled on 1984 as the title.

Junot Diaz in conversation at the Sydney Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

27/05/2008
Junot Diaz has had marvellous success with his short stories. They appeared in the New Yorker and The Paris Review and four times in subsequent editions of Best American Short Stories. Both his short story collection Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao have been critically acclaimed. Michiko Kakutani, the often hard to please critic of The New York Times called his Oscar novel 'An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fuelled by adrenaline-powered prose, it's confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that's equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.' Oscar Wao is a fat, nerdy boy, a migrant from the Dominican Republic, who lives with his sister and his mother, and dreams of becoming 'the Dominican Tolkien'. He falls in love with girls who won't respond to his nerdy advances and his greatest fear is that he will die a Virgin, unknown in the annals of Dominican Republic machismo. We meet his sister Lola and his room-mate Yunior and generations of his family who have been deeply affected by the Dominican Republic's dictatorship of Trujillo -- nicknamed 'The Goat' -- in Oscar's words the 'dictatingest dictator who ever dictated.' Before speaking to Ramona Koval, Junot Diaz began the session by reading from his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- and be warned that there's a small amount of strong language in this intrview.

Anne Enright in conversation at the Sydney Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

26/05/2008
Anne Enright's short stories make you sigh when you finish them, and each one delivers you to a place you haven't been before -- to a point of view that you may not have considered before. And of course there's her marvellous novel The Gathering, the story of the nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan, and the history that made them what they were. Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for this novel. She was educated in English and Philosophy and was a student of the famed University of East Anglia's creative writing course, taught by novelist, critic and teacher Malcolm Bradbury and the remarkable Angela Carter. She's been a television producer and has written opinion pieces for newspapers, and of course she's now a rightly celebrated novelist and essayist. Before Anne Enright spoke to Ramona Koval last Thursday evening, in Sydney's Recital Hall at Angel Place, she began with a reading from her Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering.

Why Not Catch 21? Gary Dexter looks at the stories behind book titles   Read Transcript

25/05/2008
Coming up with the perfect title for a book can be a challenge for writers. In his collection Why Not Catch 21: the Stories Behind the Titles Gary Dexter has compiled some explanations for how our favourite works ended up with their names. From Plato's Republic to Catch 22, he uncovers the debate and the lingering questions about titles we now take for granted. So how did Joseph Heller come up with the title Catch 22? Gary Dexter explains.

Rowan Somerville and The End of Sleep   Read Transcript

25/05/2008
Rowan Somerville's new novel, The End of Sleep, plunges the reader into the crumbling chaos of Cairo. The shambolic Fin, a recently unemployed journalist, pursues a story that he hopes will resurrect his career. It's a wild clash between western deadlines and the timeless telling of tales.

David Rieff live at the Sydney Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

23/05/2008
David Rieff is the author of seven previous books on immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. He's been a literary editor, a journalist and is now a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research, a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a board member of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch and a board member of the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute. But his new book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, is very much rooted in his position as the only son of writer Susan Sontag. Its subtitle is 'A Son's Memoir' and it concerns his mother's final experience of cancer -- a disease she had overcome three times before. Susan Sontag was a novelist and an essayist and a writer of non-fiction books like On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, Illness As Metaphor, and Aids and Its Metaphors. David Rieff is a special guest of the Festival and joins Ramona Koval for The Book Show.

Luke Davies and The God of Speed   Read Transcript

20/05/2008
Howard Hughes had everything -- money, fame, power -- but by the end of his life he was consumed by drug addiction and an obsession with germs that left him confined to a blacked-out hotel room. This is the period in which poet, novelist and screenwriter Luke Davies sets his new novel The God of Speed, in which he explores the decayed mind of this once famous man.

Why Not Catch 21? Gary Dexter looks at the stories behind book titles   Read Transcript

20/05/2008
Coming up with the perfect title for a book can be a challenge for writers. In his collection Why Not Catch 21: the Stories Behind the Titles Gary Dexter has compiled some explanations for how our favourite works ended up with their names. From Plato's Republic to Catch 22, he uncovers the debate and the lingering questions about titles we now take for granted. So how did Joseph Heller come up with the title Catch 22? Gary Dexter explains.

AL Kennedy: writing at night

20/05/2008
This morning it's a pleasure to welcome back Scottish writer Alison Kennedy. AL Kennedy has won many prizes for all sorts of writing, including film and television scripts, plays, short stories, and musical comedy. Her novel Day, published last year, won the Saltire prize for Scottish Book of the Year, the Costa Best Novel Award, and the Austrian state prize for European Literature. Ironically, however, it's not Day, we're speaking to her about but the night. As a self confessed night-owl, Alison Kennedy says she likes to work between 10pm and 4 or 5am. And she joined Ramona Koval live from Scotland where it was one in the morning her time.

Erotica - is it porn or is it literature?   Read Transcript

18/05/2008
What does a struggling journalist and novelist do to revive his career when times are tough? British author Rupert Smith faced that dilemma when he couldn't find a publisher for his second novel. His solution? Writing erotica under the nom de plume, or what he calls the 'nom de porn', James Lear. In a recent article in the UK Independent, Rupert Smith describes how he came to take up this lucrative genre.

Rotten English: writing in the vernacular   Read Transcript

18/05/2008
'A howl, a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind or a wave', this is how Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite describes writing in the vernacular. While dialect, creole, pidgin, broken English and patois have been thought of as corrupt versions of English, for writers who use the vernacular and who embrace the language of the street and the bars, the creative possibilities can be liberating and even revolutionary. Each colonial outpost of the British empire created its own English and today many Man Booker winners have written in the language of the street. While it may be paradoxical to anthologise writings that are often anti-institutional, Dohra Ahmad has put together an anthology called Rotten English—it's a term taken from the novel Sozaboy by Ken Saro Wiwa, the assassinated Nigerian writer. In her collection of this 'rotten' English literature, she features works from Robert Burns, Irvine Welsh, Rohinton Mistry, and also from the African diaspora. A Caribbean writer in the anthology is M. Nourbese Philip̵