Fully Lit

This NAIDOC Week, Fully Lit revisits some of the standout conversations in our back catalogue with First Nations writers, critics and publishers. As a podcast about Australian literature, we believe First Nations storytelling sits at the heart of what is most vital, challenging and exciting about writing on this continent. Stories have been told here for tens of thousands of years, and First Natio...

In this episode of Fully Lit , recorded live at the Addison Road Writers’ Festival, we explore the richness and diversity of contemporary Latin American literature. Writer Yumna Kassab joins Uruguayan author and translator Rosario Lázaro Igoa in conversation with literary translator Chris Andrews to discuss the writers, genres and ideas shaping Latin American literature today. Moving beyond the li...

In this episode of Fully Lit , Erin Vincent, in conversation with writer and academic Sarah Attfield, reflects on returning to a subject she once believed she had left behind in her verse novel, 14 Ways of Looking. Moving between memoir, research and constraint‑based writing, the book is a fragmentary work that reimagines how grief can be written, building a mosaic of memory around the the number...

In this episode of Fully Lit , we head to the Addi Road Writers’ Festival for a wide‑ranging conversation on masculinity, vulnerability, and the inner lives of men. Writer Luke Carman is joined by George Haddad, author of Losing Face , and debut novelist Jet Williams to explore what it means to write — and read — men today. From graffiti culture and underground urban exploration to questions of em...

Scholar, insomniac, and accidental romantasy expert Olivia Murphy joins us to talk about the wildly popular adults-only genre that blends Mills & Boon-style romance with Game of Thrones-style world-building, and explore its cultural significance. Olivia is an expert on the popular novel of the long 18th century. In this conversation she draws a direct line from the forgotten, formulaic, novels...

In this episode of Fully Lit , recorded live at Gleebooks in Sydney, we turn to one of the most formidable figures in Australian literature — Patrick White . Nobel Prize–winning, fiercely private, and allergic to sentimentality, White remains both towering and divisive. But what does it mean to read him now? Writer and translator Vrasidas Karalis joins journalist and biographer Helen Trinca for a...

In this episode of Fully Lit Live , UTS alumni Judi Morison and Verity Borthwick join writer and academic Dr Claire Corbett to discuss their debut novels at the 2025 UTS Writers’ Festival . Verity Borthwick’s Hollow Air is a psychological thriller set at a remote mining site in Far North Queensland, using isolation and an often-unseen industry to explore power, fear and uncertainty. Judi Morison’s...

In this episode of Fully Lit Live , Felicity Castagna joins writer and producer Sheila Ngoc Pham for a wide‑ranging conversation about writing, class, place, and longevity in the arts. The evening opens with poetry by Lebanese Australian multidisciplinary artist Charnel Rizk, whose work reflects on heritage, land, and survival. What follows is an expansive discussion tracing Felicity Castagna’s jo...

What does it mean to write in a language that isn’t your first — and to transform it completely? Antigone Kefala arrived in Australia from war-torn Europe and went on to reshape Australian literature with prose that was spare, luminous and unflinching. In this episode of Fully Lit Live , recorded at Gleebooks, writers, scholars and close friends reflect on her life, her exile and her modernism — a...

This episode of Fully Lit comes from our friends at the UTS Multicultural Women's Network, and features two poets, Anne Casey and Nadia Niaz, in conversation with host Elaine Laforteza. Both Anne and Nadia challenge the dominance of English in Australia by creating bold, multilingual poetry. What does embracing multilingualism sound like? How do these poets use language to disrupt, to heal, to rem...

Recorded live at the 2025 UTS Writers’ Festival, this episode of Fully Lit Live features novelists (and UTS writing alumni) Andrew Pippos and Gretchen Shirm in conversation with Delia Falconer. In The Transformations , Pippos sets a love story inside a newsroom on the brink of digital collapse. What happens to intimacy when the workplace becomes all-consuming? How do you hold onto care, or truth,...

In this episode of Fully Lit Live , we present The Critics Report , an event hosted by the Sydney Review of Books at the State Library of NSW in December 2025. Moderated by SRB deputy editor Tiffany Tsao, the conversation brings together critics, editors and scholars to assess a year that placed unprecedented pressure on Australian arts and cultural institutions — and on the artists and writers wh...

In this episode of Fully Lit Live , we bring you a panel discussion recorded at the Blue Mountains Writers Festival in November 2025. James Jiang , editor of the Sydney Review of Books , hosts Willo Drummond and Hasib Hourani for an exploration of how poems work - in the body, on the page, and in your ears. From a discussion of formative reading experiences to a shared close reading of Emma Lew’s...

Alexis Wright’s novels are often thought of as “difficult,” but this episode of Fully Lit Live challenges that label, and asks what that word is really doing. Critic Geordie Williamson is the author of the recent On Alexis Wright , part of Black Ink’s 'Writers on Writers' series. In this conversation with Ivor Indyk , Wright’s publisher and editor at Giramondo , we learn how to read Wright’s books...

In this episode, we return to Roland Barthes’ famous 1967 essay, The Death of the Author . This influential text is often taught as an anti-authoritarian gesture, shifting the power of meaning from the author to the reader. But what happens when we consider Barthes’ ideas alongside the voices of anticolonial writers who, at the same historical moment, were mobilising literature to galvanise commun...

Recorded at the UTS Writers’ Festival on Friday, 7 November 2025 , this episode of Fully Lit Live brings you Rebel Daughters , where you’ll hear acclaimed poet Anne Casey share readings from her latest collection, followed by a Q&A with award-winning poet and critic Sarah Holland-Batt , newly appointed Professor and Head of Creative Writing at UTS . Together, they explore themes of resilience,...

In December 2023, the Sydney Review of Books  and Western Sydney University's Writing and Society Research Centre were delighted to announce renowned fiction writer, Yumna Kassab, as the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature, a program delivered in partnership with the City of Parramatta. The program, now in its second iteration, recognises the unique and vital work of writers as contri...

In this episode, we’re bringing you a story from our friends at History Lab . Historical novelist Sienna Brown brings to life the story of Nellie Small, a trailblazing performer whose life challenged the boundaries of race, gender, and identity in early 20th-century Australia. You'll hear actor Zahra Newman as Nellie, and an interview with playwright Alana Valentina, for whom Nellie has been a ric...

In this special live episode of Fully Lit , we head to Parramatta for The Poets Speak , an evening of powerful readings and conversation presented by Giramondo Publishing. Recorded as part of Parramatta’s Lit Festival and the Sydney Fringe Festival, the event features acclaimed poets Eunice Andrada ( Kontra ), Kate Fagan ( Song in the Grass ), Hasib Hourani ( rock flight ), Šime Knežević ( In Your...

Explore the poetic, philosophical, and genre-defying world of Gail Jones’s latest novel,  The Name of the Sister , in this episode of  Fully Lit Live .  In conversation with fellow author Debra Adelaide, Jones reflects on the difference between a crime novel and a novel with a crime in it, and asks how a novel might bear witness to suffering, honouring rather than exploiting it. Jon...

In this spirited discussion, three critics—Max Easton, Eda Gunaydin, and Lucy Van—join Sydney Review of Books editor, James Jiang, to explore the evolving role of the critic. Together, they delve into how they each came to criticism, the influences that shaped their voices, the ethics and implications of writing negative reviews, and whether we are truly living in a post-literate culture. This epi...

Poetry month has been and gone, but we have plenty more to say about poetry and poetry criticism! So we're bringing you a 2024 episode of ' Poetry Says ,' wherein host Alice Allan reflects on Ben Etherington's 2015 essay ' The Poet Tasters ' - a forensic and statistical critique of Australian poetry that brought Alice's career as a poetry reviewer to an abrupt stop. What kind of critical cult...

Hear what poet and critic Sarah Holland-Batt has to say about Australia's as-yet-uncrowned Poet Laureate. She takes a close look at the tradition and explores poetry's relationship to power, highlighting the potential pitfalls and possible benefits of such a figure. Can a poet laureate bring poetry back in Australia, where it's long been an afterthought for cultural policymakers? How might such a...

This special edition of Fully Lit Live was recorded at the Abercrombie Hotel in Sydney, on beautiful Gadigal land. It was a night of celebration, conversation, and creative sparks, as we launched the podcast with a vibrant discussion on the power of audio as a medium for literary criticism - one where the critique is embodied, voiced and felt, and built in conversation with one another and wi...

On this episode Teela Reid and Merinda Dutton, the co-founders of Blackfulla Bookclub, talk about the online community they’ve built around First Nations storytelling and discuss their experiences of reading Fire Front, an anthology of poetry and essays curated by Alison Whittaker. It’s about seeing, and hearing, and reading the world through powerful First Nations perspectives. Listen up.  W...