Past Programs
Comedy and Humour - 2008
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
From parody to patronage: John Clarke and poetry Read Transcript
11/05/2008
John Clarke, who brought us Fred Dagg, the ABC television series The Games, and the 7.30 Report's John Clarke and Brian Dawe interviews, has also written parodies of major poets - from the English romantics to the classic Australian bush balladeers. Now he has a new role, as patron of the Australian Poetry Centre.
From parody to patronage: John Clarke and poetry Read Transcript
22/04/2008
John Clarke, who brought us Fred Dagg, the ABC television series The Games, and the 7.30 Report's John Clarke and Brian Dawe interviews, has also written parodies of major poets - from the English romantics to the classic Australian bush balladeers. Now he has a new role, as patron of the Australian Poetry Centre.
Garry Trudeau, creator of the Doonesbury comic strip
04/04/2008
In a very rare public appearance at the recent New Zealand Post Writers and Readers week in Wellington, Garry Trudeau, the creator of the bitingly political and satirical Doonesbury cartoon strip spoke to Radio New Zealand's Sean Plunket. He talks about the enduring characters who have navigated their way through wars, political turmoil and a changing American way of life ever since the first cartoon appeared in October 1970.
In 1975 Garry Trudeau became the first comic strip artist to receive a Pulitzer prize and he's been a finalist three times since, most recently in 2005. He's one of the most pointed, acerbic and internationally published commentators on our times. Doonesbury is now published in 1,400 newspapers around the world, but for most of the 38 years he's been creating the comic strip, readers have only known Garry Trudeau through his characters. He didn't engage personally in public debate and he made a point of keeping out of the public eye. He also deliberately didn't spend time thinking about what he was doing, his creative processes or what made the comic strip work. All of that has changed in recent years. In this excerpt from his New Zealand appearance Garry Trudeau begins by explaining when the change in his approach began and why.
Merde Happens - Stephen Clarke
30/01/2008
A couple of years after arriving in Paris, 27-year-old English lad Paul West is still coming to terms with some of the fundamental cultural differences between the English and the 'Frogs' -- and is still searching for the perfect French mademoiselle.
Paul West is the creation of Stephen Clarke, a British novelist living in France whose Brit-in-Paris adventures have been immortalised in the novel A Year In The Merde and its follow-ups, Merde Actually and Merde Happens.
Clarke has also published a 'survival guide' for expats living in France: Talk To The Snail, which he divided into 'ten commandments' or chapters that include 'Thou Shalt Not Work', 'Thou Shalt Not Love They Neighbour' and 'Thy Shalt not Be Served'.
Rhiannon Brown met up with Stephen Clarke at the Cafe Zimmer in Paris.
She asked where the character of Paul West came from and whether he resembled Stephen Clarke when he first came to Paris?
