Past Programs
Books - Autobiography - 2008
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.
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.
Thirteen Tonne Theory by Mark Seymour (review) Read Transcript
20/10/2008
For eighteen years Mark Seymour fronted the band Hunters and Collectors, through the songs that made it, like 'Throw Your Arms Around Me', 'Talking to a Stranger' and 'Holy Grail' and the years of hard work playing festivals and overflowing pubs. Ten years after Hunters and Collectors disbanded Mark Seymour wrote about his experiences with the band in Thirteen Tonne Theory: Life Inside Hunter and Collectors, reviewed here by David Astle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dreams from my Father - Barack Obama (review) Read Transcript
03/07/2008
As well as being a candidate for the United States presidency, Barack Obama is an author. His first book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, was originally published in 1995 and has recently been re-released. It was written before Obama became involved in politics and is part meditation on race relations and part personal memoir. In it he writes about his childhhood, his years as an organiser in Chicago, and his family connection with Kenya.
Script editor and former ABC drama producer Rodney Wetherell reviews it for The Book Show.
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.
Clunes Booktown - John Marsden
02/05/2008
John Marsden hasn't had to travel very far to get to Clunes Booktown.
John is a popular Australian children's and young adults' author, his books include the popular Tomorrow series, The Head Book, The Boy You Brought Home and many more.
He is a teacher who set up a school near Hanging Rock, Mt Macedon, called Candelbark, which is in this beautiful region. And he's come here today with some of his students.
He'll be in Clunes over the weekend in conversation with the other guest writers too, and he joins Ramona Koval and Michael Mackenzie for a reading from his book Marsden on Marsden.
Should Nabokov's unpublished manuscript be burned? Read Transcript
24/02/2008
Dmitri Nabokov is 73, and he has a difficult decision to make: he has fragments of an unpublished manuscript by his father, Vladimir, that the father wanted burned after his death. Vera Nabokov, Vladimir's wife, couldn't do it and Dmitri Nabokov has been the literary executor of Vladimir Nabokov's estate since his mother died in 1991 and he hasn't carried out his father's wishes either. What should he do?
Should Nabokov's unpublished manuscript be burned? Read Transcript
15/02/2008
Dmitri Nabokov is 73, and he has a difficult decision to make: he has fragments of an unpublished manuscript by his father, Vladimir, that the father wanted burned after his death. Vera Nabokov, Vladimir's wife, couldn't do it and Dmitri Nabokov has been the literary executor of Vladimir Nabokov's estate since his mother died in 1991 and he hasn't carried out his father's wishes either. What should he do?
Gunter Grass's Peeling the Onion (review) Read Transcript
22/01/2008
Just over a year ago, when Nobel prize-winning German writer Gunter Grass was 78, he revealed that in his youth he'd been a member of Hitler's Waffen-SS. This was a secret he'd kept for 60 years, and its disclosure was understandably shocking for those who'd come to rely on Grass as a kind of post-war moral beacon.
Grass gives an account of his time with the SS in his autobiography Peeling the Onion, and Geordie Williamson has been reading it for The Book Show.
