Past Programs
Gay, Lesbian and Transgender - 2008
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.
Patrick Gale: Brisbane Writers' Festival Read Transcript
24/01/2008
Patrick Gale was at the Brisbane Writers Festival with me in September last year with his 13th novel Notes from an Exhibition. Set in Gale's home county of Cornwall, it tells of a family headed by a woman who is both successful artist and manic depressive mother; roles that are hard to separate.
Each chapter of the book begins with a note from the exhibition of the work and life of an artist called Rachel Kelly. She's a painter, a mother of four -- in fact a very bad mother of four; she has bi-polar illness, and is a gifted and tormented artist with an extremely loving and forgiving husband. Patrick Gale shows her in all her facets.
From the 2007 Brisbane Writers' Festival Patrick Gale began with a reading from Notes from an Exhibition.
