Past Programs
Events and Festivals - 2007
The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library
20/12/2007
The Book Show visits a mobile library which caters to the homeless people of Sydney.
For most people, the word 'library' conjures a quiet, indoor space, filled with books organised meticulously along Dewey decimal lines. A place to borrow books - as long as you hand over details of your identity, and a promise to bring them back.
But imagine a library which inverts all that: a noisy, outdoor affair where the books are different every time you visit, where no one wants to know your last name, and you're allowed to take books away, and never bring them back.
The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library in Sydney is all that -- it's a mobile library that looks after the reading needs of the city's homeless people.
For the Book Show, Catherine Freyne paid a visit.
If you'd like to donate to the library or contribute in some other way, you can contact founder Sarah Garnett by writing to us here at
Listener Enquiries
ABC Radio National
GPO Box 9994
Sydney NSW 2001
Or by email: info_rn@your.abc.net.au
Make sure you mark your correspondence to the attention of Sarah Garnett.
In praise of the common reader: Ramona Koval's Overland public lecture Read Transcript
14/12/2007
Instead of being the host who asks the questions, today we have Ramona Koval's Overland lecture. We often talk about literature as a window on the real world, but some still ask whether you can understand real life by reading novels. In her lecture, Ramona Koval borrows from Virginia Woolf to talk about the common reader: to praise the common reader's good sense and to warn against restricting what should and shouldn't be read.
A homage to Alice Munro from the Edinburgh International Book Festival
04/12/2007
At this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, the much-loved Scottish poet Liz Lockhead told a packed audience why she loves the work of Alice Munro.
Alice Munro is widely considered one of the best living writers in the world. Her short stories are largely set in Canada's southwestern Ontario but Alice Munro's reach is international.
And the Edinburgh International Book Festival paid special tribute to her this year with a series of events -- including one, hosted by fellow Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, that was attended by a host of other writers who love Munro's work -- writers like Ali Smith, Kate Atkinson, and Liz Lockhead herself.
Here, Liz Lockhead celebrates the work of Alice Munro.
Sydney PEN Voices series -- Christos Tsiolkas on tolerance
30/11/2007
Today we bring you the third and final instalment from the Sydney PEN Voices series.
PEN is the international association of writers devoted to freedom of expression, and one of the most fruitful and interesting projects undertaken this year by Sydney PEN has been to commission three very politically engaged writers to explore some of the thorny issues facing Australia today, in a series of public lectures.
All of which we've brought to you here on The Book Show. As you may recall, Alexis Wright took on fear. Gideon Haigh tackled prejudice, and today, Christos Tsiolkas looks at tolerance.
And after the lecture he expands on his ideas in conversation with the writer and journalist David Marr.
Jane Austen and comedy
29/11/2007
Jane Austen is read from Bath in England, where she spent her later life, to Australia, India and Japan. Perhaps what explains her near universal celebration is her wit. This week the international flavour of her comedy is being celebrated in Melbourne at La Trobe University at a Jane Austen and Comedy conference.
Political satire...we promise we won't talk about the election...maybe
23/11/2007
Now it's a fair guess that, apart from the hard-core political junkies among us, after such a seemingly interminable federal election campaign, most of us are well ready for a good, cathartic scream, followed by a lie down.
Why do they do it to us? Why do we allow them to do it to us? Maybe the answer is that it provides the excuse, and the fuel, for that most exquisite of creative forms -- satire. And the more we hate our pollies and bureaucrats, the more we love our purveyors of political parody.
And for some reason, this political campaign seems to have generated a glorious revival of the art-form of (to use that most Australian of colloquialisms) the 'piss-take'
So as we take a sharp intake of breath before the scream, Ramona Koval is joined by three people who indulge in a bit of parodic behaviour themselves.
Fiona Katauskas, one of this countries marvellous cartoonists, whose work appears mainly in the Sydney Morning Herald and who also produces the 'Talking Pictures' segment of the Insiders program on ABC TV.
Danny Katz, writer and columnist and an expert in the art of social satire; contributor to The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and author of a very cute new children's book called A Little Election, with fabulous images by Mitch Vane.
And finally, the man who has been distilling the output of our newspaper artists for many years now, as editor of the much anticipated annual Best Australian Political Cartoons, Russ Radcliffe.
Literary drag -- Melbourne Writers' Festival
21/11/2007
Good writers are often praised for their ability to get inside the heads of their characters - to slip seamlessly and convincingly into the skin of another person.
Paradoxically they're also noted for their distinctive authorial voices -- the sense of their unique selves and perspective on the world infused in their words.
But can we really read the writer behind the text? At this year's Melbourne Writers Festival - Michael Robotham and Alexander McCall Smith - author of the much loved Number 1. Ladies' Detective Agency series - talk about writing in the voice of the opposite sex.
Inga Clendinnen on the impossibility of biography Read Transcript
09/11/2007
Virginia Woolf loved reading autobiography, but said biography itself was impossible. So, can life stories be told? It's a question that Inga Clendinnen, the writer and historian, faced when she was asked to give this year's National Biography Award Lecture.
Inga Clendinnen has been praised around the world for her work on Aztec and Mayan cultures, and her book, Reading the Holocaust, received many awards, including being named as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times in 1999.
The following year, Inga Clendinnen published her own memoir, Tiger's Eye, but it's something that she looks back on with mixed emotions.
She recently gave her lecture, on the impossibility of biography, in Sydney and a week later, in Melbourne. It was the fifth ever National Biography Award Lecture, an annual lecture tied to the National Biography Award, which was established in 1996 to encourage the highest standards of writing in biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in the genre.
And this year, the award went to Jacob G Rosenberg for East of Time, set in Poland during Rosenberg's own childhood.
Here is Inga Clendinnen giving the 2007 National Biography Award Lecture on Virginia Woolf's declaration of the impossibility of biography.
Doris Lessing - Nobel prize winner 2007 Read Transcript
12/10/2007
Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel prize for literature by the Swedish Academy. Today we're bringing you a conversation Ramona Koval had with her in Edinburgh in 1999 when she'd just published the novel Mara and Dan.
Frankfurt Book Fair
11/10/2007
It's that time of year when all the important folk of the book industry gather in Frankfurt, as they deal and scheme at the World's largest annual book fair.
Andrew Wilkins, publisher of Bookseller + Publisher magazine and the online Weekly Book Newsletter is there.
He spoke to Ramona Koval about the heightened emphasis on digital publishing and rights, about the featured language and culture of Catalan -- but most importantly it seems for Andrew they spoke about food and food writing.
National Young Writers' Festival
03/10/2007
What have characters like zombies and Death got to do with writers' festivals? They were part of the controlled choas of this year's National Young Writers Festival for the annual This Is Not Art gathering in Newcastle.
Young writers, creatives and zinesters converged on the beach town to share ideas, home-made books and to have fun, and the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange was there. She discovered that over the festival's nine year history, it's changed lives.
Armistead Maupin: Brisbane Writers' Festival Read Transcript
18/09/2007
San Francisco writer and gay activist Armistead Maupin, author of the best-selling series Tales of The City, in conversation with Ramona Koval at the Brisbane Writers' Festival about his most recent book, Michael Tolliver Lives.
After 18 years, Maupin has returned to Barbary Lane in this new book which is another love song to Maupin's adopted home. Tolliver was of course the beloved hero of the Tales of The City series, a man who has been living with AIDS for a long time now. The book begins with Michael being greeted by a man he passes in the street who says 'You're supposed to be dead'.
So Michael Tolliver has survived with AIDS into his late fifties, and has even fallen in love and married his much younger husband Ben. Here, from the Brisbane Writers' Festival last Sunday afternoon is Armistead Maupin. And a warning: there's sexually explicit language and adult themes in what you're about to hear.
The empire strikes back: Nury Vittachi's literary report from Asia
13/09/2007
Where the Man Booker's concerned, the Empire has really struck back in recent years, last year's winner was Indian born Kiran Desai and this year, among the Asian writers long- and short-listed is Nikita Lalwani for her first novel, Gifted, Indra Sinha for Animal's People and Tan Twang Eng for Gift of Rain. So, it's a good time to have a chat to our man in Asia, Nury Vittachi from the Asian Literary Review and find out if this is just a coincidence.
Jon Ronson: Edinburgh International Book Festival
12/09/2007
Journalist, writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson has written several funny books about the world of conspiracy theorists. In Them: Adventures with Extremists and The men who stare at goats, he takes us around jihad training camps, to Ku Klux Klan meetings, and inside American militia groups. Out of the Ordinary is his new book; a collection of pieces from The Guardian charting the rise of more domestic madnesses.
Germaine Greer: Edinburgh International Book Festival
07/09/2007
The irrepressible intelligence of Germaine Greer has recently been applied to a subject she knows a lot about. She did her PhD in 1968 on the ethic of love and marriage in Shakespeare's early comedies, and in her new book Shakespeare's Wife, she takes another look at the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. The marriage has had a very bad press from generations of Oxford and Cambridge dons, who regarded it as cold and loveless. But Germaine argues that Anne has been undervalued both for what she meant to Shakespeare and what she contributed to his work.
This lecture was recorded by the Book Show at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Fay Weldon: Edinburgh International Book Festival
06/09/2007
Since Fay Weldon's Down Among the Women, written in the 1970s, she has written about subjects from cloning to cuckolding. Her new novel is, in a sense, again 'down among the women', but this time the women are high achievers -- mortgage brokers, judges, journalists even.
In The Spa Decameron, ten women meet at a spa over Christmas and New Year and indulge in ten days of pampering and talking together.
Graham Swift: Edinburgh International Book Festival
05/09/2007
Booker prize-winner Graham Swift, who explores the nature of families and blood ties in his latest novel, Tomorrow, in conversation with Ramona Koval at the 2007 Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Tomorrow is set in a single night, the night before a couple is to tell their twin 16-year-old children a secret of their birth. It is a story of a marriage and the delicate matter of cherishing happiness.
Pat Barker: Edinburgh International Book Festival Read Transcript
04/09/2007
Booker prize winning writer Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy made her famous for her moving portrayal of shell shock victims in the First World War, returns to that battle front in her latest book. Life Class looks at a group of artists at the famous Slade art school and the debates around what are fitting subjects to be portrayed in art -- is it the beauty or the reality of life?
Colin Thubron: Edinburgh International Book Festival Read Transcript
03/09/2007
In the first of a series of interviews from the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ramona Koval talks with eminent travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron about his book, Shadow of the Silk Road. The Silk Road is not a single path so much as a network of trade routes that criss-crossed Asia from China to the Mediterranean. In his travels along the Silk Road, Colin Thubron discusses many things: from what he packs in his bag to questions about identity.
Dave Eggers: novelist, social activist and pirate supply store owner
31/08/2007
Dave Eggers is something of a phenomenon. In fact he was described in the London Observer as the Michael Jordon of American literature. He first shot to fame seven years ago, when his memoir, A Heart-breaking Work of Staggering Genius, became a surprising number one best seller.
Since then, he has established his own publishing company McSweeneys, which publishes a literary journal open to all writers -- that sells like hotcakes and attracts the biggest names in literature today. Names like Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith and Pulitzer prize winner Michael Chabon.
He has also written a number of books -- What is the What being the latest.
Dave Eggers speaks at the Melbourne Writers' Festival to writer and broadcaster Tony Wilson -- and an apology, the sound quality of lapel mics in old town halls is never as good as we'd like it to be...
Young writers in Australia: from grunge literature to DIY publishing
31/08/2007
In the 90s there was a surge of under 35s being published, much of their work being critically acclaimed. But fast forward to 2007, and submissions to publishers appear to have dropped considerably. Have they discovered DIY on the internet perhaps, or have they just lost interest in what is still a baby-boomer dominated literary landscape?
Young writers can certainly make an splash. Take a look overseas: think of Zadie Smith who published White Teeth at 25 and won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2000. 26-year-old novelist Jonathan Saffron Foer's first book Everything is Illuminated has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
And then there's Granta -- it's dedicated whole editions to the work of young American and British writers. To be a 'Granta Young Writer' has cultural kudos.
But what about in Australia? Do we encourage young writers enough?
David Leavitt on Alan Turing Read Transcript
30/08/2007
Champion of artificial intelligence and the mathematical mind behind the Allies' victory in World War II, Alan Turing was crippled by treatment that was meant to 'cure' him of homosexuality. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, David Leavitt sensitively portrays this tragedy, which led to Turing's suicide.
Ewan Morrison's The Last Book You Read and Other Stories Read Transcript
29/08/2007
In Australia for the Age Melbourne Writers' Festival, Ewan Morrison speaks to the Book Show about his collection of streetwise short stories. The Last Book You Read and Other Stories captures the desires of men and women who are gay, straight, young and old.
Jorge Luis Borges - politically blind but a literary visionary
20/08/2007
It's the 108th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges -- the great Argentinian writer known for his short stories and strange mythical creations in The Book of Imaginary Beings.
In his honour, a Symposium on Borges is being held in Sydney from 23 to 24 August. It's a collaboration between Macquarie University, the Argentine Consulate General of Argentina and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Symposium is looking at Borges's literary connections with the English world.
Jeff Browitt is giving a presentation at the symposium. Jeff is Senior Lecturer Latin American Studies, University of Technology Sydney, and he joins us on the phone from Sydney.
What is structural editing? Read Transcript
08/08/2007
Just about every time we speak about the poor state of editing in today's publishing industry, mention is made of the lack of money and about the lack of attention to structural editing. But what exactly is structural editing? At the Byron Bay writers Festival a couple of weeks ago, a workshop on structural editing was given by Freelance editor and writer Shelley Kenigsberg.
Shelley has coordinated and delivered the Macleay Diploma in Book Editing and Publishing in Sydney for 16 years, and has developed and presented courses for the Society of Editors around Australia the Style Council, and language and corporate institutes overseas.
The future of digital publishing
20/07/2007
What does the future of the book look like? Imagine a Dungeons and Dragons role playing type game but that instead of pretending to be a knight or a wizard, you're doing it with characters from a funky new novel - say from The Raw Shark Texts. Or, if you're an author, imagine you no longer make money from your book, but from the tie-ins your book produces - maybe a computer game like the one just described.
These scenarios have been hot topics of discussion this week at a seminar about the future of digital publishing organised by the Australia Council. Publishers, literary agents and authors have been imagining a world of print on demand and ebook utopia. They have been nutting out issues from the more glamorous side of marketing to the fiddly problems of digital rights management.
Desert writers' walk ... the Larapinta Trail
17/07/2007
Travel writer Robyn Davidson says that she was transformed by her experience of trekking across the desert.
Big open spaces are inspirational -- and don't they just make you want to write?
Well, Into the Blue, which organises creative getaways, recently took a group of writers into the central Australian desert for a week of writing and walking along the Larapinta Trail.
For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Jan Cornall, the desert writers guide, and Rowena Harding Smith, a psychologist who was one of the walkers on this getaway.
Jan begins by describing the Larapinta Trail.
Australian illuminated manuscripts
03/07/2007
The heyday of illuminated manuscripts was in the middle ages. But, did you know there is a tradition of illuminated books in Australia and that works by Henry Lawson, AB Patterson and Ogilvie have been given this ornate treatment?
The State Library of Queensland has a collection of exquisite Australian illuminated books on display in the Talbot Family Treasures Wall at the moment.
For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to the exhibition conservator about some of her favourite exhibits. Rhiannon Walker starts with the Australian history of illluminated books.
Clunes Booktown for a Day
27/05/2007
How do you reinvent your town to attract tourists? One way that has been successful in rural towns in the UK and USA is to market it as a 'booktown' and make it a mecca for all things bookish. That is what Clunes, near Ballarat in Victoria has done. On the weekend, Clunes held its first ever 'Booktown for a day' and rare book traders—and book lovers—flocked to the gold rush town. But there's more to making 'booktown' a success than bringing the tourists—there needs to be support from booksellers and the local community.
For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange went to Clunes on the weekend to witness its transformation into a 'booktown'.
Clunes Booktown for a Day
24/05/2007
How do you reinvent your town to attract tourists? One way that has been successful in rural towns in the UK and USA is to market it as a 'booktown' and make it a mecca for all things bookish. That is what Clunes, near Ballarat in Victoria has done. On the weekend, Clunes held its first ever 'Booktown for a day' and rare book traders—and book lovers—flocked to the gold rush town. But there's more to making 'booktown' a success than bringing the tourists—there needs to be support from booksellers and the local community.
For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange went to Clunes on the weekend to witness its transformation into a 'booktown'.
Post-Soviet writing in Russia
18/05/2007
At the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, Ramona Koval spoke to three expatriate Russian writers – David Bezmozgis, Bakhyt Kenjeev, and Mikhail Iossel – about Putin's Russia and whether the political climate there is affecting Russian writers today. Are they feeling the weight of Putin's repression?
A recent report from Russia is that journalists from its largest independent radio news network have been instructed to report "positive" Russian news at least 50 per cent of the time. Journalists working for the Russian News Service were also informed that opposition leaders could not be mentioned and the US was to be portrayed as an enemy.
Noah Richler's Literary Atlas of Canada
17/05/2007
Writer and broadcaster Noah Richler is this year's winner of the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada. The jury for the prize described it as a window into Candian writing in the present day. Ramona Koval brings you her chat with Noah Richler at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal.
The joy of living of Kadar Abdollah
16/05/2007
Today you'll meet a very charismatic writer who was born in Iran, but who now lives in the Netherlands and writes best-sellers in Dutch: Kadar Abdollah is his name. My Father's Notebook is his first novel to be translated into English.
Kadar Abdollah was a physics student and a politically active one in Tehran who resisted first the regime of the Shah and then the Ayatollah Khomeini. He wrote for a banned publication and secretly published two books about life under Khomeini and subsequently found himself fleeing Iran in 1985 and coming to the Netherlands as a refugee in 1988.
My Father's Notebook is a complex and tender book, and Kadar Abdollah was in conversation with Ramona Koval at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal.
A big book about apples
26/03/2007
In Australia, apples are almost synonymous with Tasmania, and now a book on its contribution to agricultural history has won the University of Tasmania's prize for Best Book by a Tasmanian Publisher—awarded as part of the Tasmanian Book Prize celebrations. The book is called The Art of Apple Branding: Australian Apple Case Labels and the Industry since 1788. It's a gorgeous production, highlighting the rich and colourful artwork that adorned apple boxes and labels as far back as 1788.
Chris Cowles, the co-author of this prize-winning book joins us to discuss the production of this book which became a labour of love.
Artists' books: A creative collaboration
15/03/2007
Collaborations are an important feature in the creation of finely made artists' books. Professor Sasha Grishin says that "collaboration is like the art of listening, but listening for the harmony, not the melody."
We meet two people who have been working together, in harmony, for over 15 years making artists' books: printmaker, Bruno Leti and poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange visited the studio of Bruno Leti in Melbourne to discover how they work together. Chris Wallace-Crabbe begins with a poem that marks the beginning of their collaboration.
