Past Programs
History - 2006
Janette Turner Hospital: Rooted Cosmopolitanism
24/11/2006
What is Rooted Cosmopolitanism and what does it have to do with medieval literature and what does it have to do with contemporary Australian fiction?
Rooted Cosmopolitanism is the subject of Janette Turner Hospital's address which launched this year's Byron Bay Writers' Festival. And it is also, as it turns out, a phrase which describes herself.
Janette Turner Hospital is one of Australia's literary diaspora. She currently resides in the US, where she's the Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. But Janette has been a traveller since birth. She's perhaps best known for her most recent work Due Preparations For The Plague, which is actually a way into writing about the subject of terrorism. However, she clearly loves thinking and speaking about wanderers, as well as wandering herself. In this particular literary excursion she begins with the writings of the first millennium and progresses to March, the novel about the America Civil War which won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Geraldine Brooks, and along the way she follows the flight of a sparrow across a hall.
Norwegian star writer Asne Seierstad on the legacy of the Balkan war
17/09/2006
Asne Seierstad is a Norwegian writer and newspaper and television journalist who was born in 1970 and studied Russian, Spanish and the History of Philosophy at Oslo University. She has worked as a war correspondent, first in Russia between 1993 and 1996, then in China in 1997. Between 1998 and 2000 she reported on the war in Kosovo for Norwegian television, and in 2001 she spent three months in Afghanistan, reporting for a number of major Scandinavian newspapers. In spring 2003 she reported on the war in Iraq from Baghdad.
You may already know her as the author of her bestselling book The Bookseller of Kabul. In that book she related her experiences in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime. She met a bookseller there and asked to write about his family. She moved into his flat for three months to collect material from the 12 family members who lived there. Her portrait of the family patriarch was not flattering, and he threatened to sue her following the publication of the book.
She has also written of her time in Iraq in A Hundred and One Days: A Bagdad Journal. But in the interview you are about to hear, recorded last month at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, we're talking about another book, set in a complex political and moral landscape. It's called With Their Backs To The World: Portrait From Serbia. The book itself has an interesting history. It is an updated version of her first book, and it's fascinating, not only because it's a forensic portrait of a cross-section of Serbian characters (and I say characters because she has the novelist's touch for description and story), but also because she visits these people again and again, and that's unusual, for a correspondent like Åsne Seierstad, to maintain relationships long after the journalistic caravan has moved on, as it were.
Norwegian star writer Asne Seierstad on the legacy of the Balkan war
11/09/2006
Asne Seierstad is a Norwegian writer and newspaper and television journalist who was born in 1970 and studied Russian, Spanish and the History of Philosophy at Oslo University. She has worked as a war correspondent, first in Russia between 1993 and 1996, then in China in 1997. Between 1998 and 2000 she reported on the war in Kosovo for Norwegian television, and in 2001 she spent three months in Afghanistan, reporting for a number of major Scandinavian newspapers. In spring 2003 she reported on the war in Iraq from Baghdad.
You may already know her as the author of her bestselling book The Bookseller of Kabul. In that book she related her experiences in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime. She met a bookseller there and asked to write about his family. She moved into his flat for three months to collect material from the 12 family members who lived there. Her portrait of the family patriarch was not flattering, and he threatened to sue her following the publication of the book.
She has also written of her time in Iraq in A Hundred and One Days: A Bagdad Journal. But in the interview you are about to hear, recorded last month at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, we're talking about another book, set in a complex political and moral landscape. It's called With Their Backs To The World: Portrait From Serbia. The book itself has an interesting history. It is an updated version of her first book, and it's fascinating, not only because it's a forensic portrait of a cross-section of Serbian characters (and I say characters because she has the novelist's touch for description and story), but also because she visits these people again and again, and that's unusual, for a correspondent like Åsne Seierstad, to maintain relationships long after the journalistic caravan has moved on, as it were.
