Life Sentences Podcast

In this episode, Sophie Cunningham talks about using biography as the thematic spine of her novel This Devastating Fever. The bold, playful narrative interweaves two strands: a modern day one in which Melbourne based biographer Alice is struggling to write a biography of Leonard Woolf, and a historical one, in which we meet Leonard in his life as a civil servant in Ceylon and in his marriage to Vi...

Bryce Courtenay remains one of the highest selling Australians writers of all times, with sales of more than 20 million of his blockbuster stories of life in Africa and in Australia. Beginning with the Power of One, which became a classic, he took off as a novelist in his fifties after a successful career in advertising. But his beginnings were far from promising and it took all his willpower and...

The family biography is a popular  pastime, but few family biographies get published or are as colourful and bohemian as Sharon Connolly’s account of her vaudevillian relatives, including her great Aunt Gladys who was best known for her prowess as a whistler.  Featuring a roll-call of rogues and eccentrics, My Giddy Aunt goes beyond  biography to become a culture history of the disappearing age of...

How has Lachlan Murdoch managed to live comparatively below the radar given his immense power and influence as a  media player? And why  is it so important to him that he identifies strongly as an Australian ? Journalist biographer  Paddy Manning answers these and many other questions  about the heir to Rupert Murdoch’s dynasty and the threat posed by his siblings in The Successor , a biography wh...

As a society figure in Georgian England, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was more than a hostess, gossip and subject of scandal. A sharp wit, she wrote essays that were radical in their ideas, and way ahead of their time. She was also an early pioneer of inoculation, a technique she observed and experimented with on her own children  as a diplomat’s wife in Turkey. Friend to the good and the great, incl...

In their heyday, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were the most glamorous and famous couple of stage and screen in Britain, he for his patriotic and patrician roles  as Lord Nelson and Shakespeare’s heroes and villains, she  as the  beautiful actress who won Hollywood’s most coveted role in Gone with the Wind as Scarlett O’Hara. But the chemistry  between them had a dangerous side, overshadowed b...

In between the two world wars, a group of lesbian expatriate women from the US and UK found freedom in Paris to explore and foster creativity. They dressed differently and lived and loved with abandon. Some are well known to us today, like Gertrude Stein, some have been forgotten, among them Sylvia Beach, who took a risk and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would touch it. In this...

Award winning author Kate Grenville has an ambivalent attitude to biography.  She leverages  this by using its materials, particularly letters, to create an alternative version of events in her novel A Room Made of Leaves , about the colonial figure of Elizabeth Macarthur. But when she came to editing the original letters for a recently published collection, what else did she discover about Elizab...

In this episode, First Nations guest interviewer Daniel Browning talks to first time author Alec O’Halloran  about  The Master from Marnpi, his biography First Nations artist Mick  Namarari Tjapaltjarri. O’Halloran had never written a biography  before, but had bought a painting by the artist and become fascinated by  his way of expressing his place and his culture.  Over several years and many vi...

Few biographers can equal Claire Tomalin’s reputation as the queen of British biography. After her beginnings in journalism, she’s had a long and glittering  career writing about the illustrious lives of Dickens and Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry James, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Katherine Mansfield - an amazing roll call. Modest and self-effacing herself,  Tomalin  has also shed life on wo...

Katharine Susannah Pritchard (1883 -1969) enjoyed early success as a writer, travelled internationally and married a war hero. Despite seeming privilege, her life was anything but smooth. In this episode, Caroline Baum talks to her biographer Nathan Hobby about uncovering the identity of her married lover, and how she became a passionate and uncritical follower of Soviet Communist ideology while w...

When Charmian Clift returned to Australia with her husband George Johnston and their children, they left behind a creative Greek idyll and returned to suburban Sydney at a time of social upheaval. Charmian threw herself into her weekly column on the women’s pages of a major newspaper and used it to question whether the country had changed as much as people claimed it had during their absence.  See...

Caroline Baum talks to the doyenne of Australian biography Brenda Niall on the publication of her memoir, An Accidental Career, about her evolution as a biographer, which coincided with fresh interest in figures in Australian cultural history. Niall reflects on how the status of biography has changed, how she came to write about figures like the Boyd dynasty and the recurring themes of home and di...

One of the most perplexing figures in modern Australian literary biography, Eve Langley used her experiences as a teenager with her sister in rural Victoria as the basis for her bestselling novel The Pea Pickers. But many other aspects of her life remain a mystery to this day. Why did she spend seven years in a mental institution? Why did she change her name to Oscar Wilde? Why did she lose contac...

In one of the most remarkable seafaring stories of stowaway adventure, Suzanne Falkiner tells the story of Rose de Freycinet, who could not bear to be parted from her husband and so, wearing men’s clothes, snuck on to his ship  in 1817 to join his scientific expedition to the South Seas. In doing so, not only was Rose doing something highly illegal, but she  also became the first w...

Multi-award winning novelist Colm Toibin tackles his second biographical novel in The Magician, about the German novelist Thomas Mann and his eccentric family.   After writing The Master, his first biographical novel about Henry James, Toibin turns to another writer with a secret inner life as a homosexual who, like James, also lived in exile from his homeland.   The Magician takes us fr...

When Mary Beauchamp, a musical young woman from a middle class family in Sydney married a German count, she became Elizabeth von Arnim. Soon disenchanted with marriage and motherhood, she shut herself away at her country estate and began writing bestselling books about her garden and the society around her.  She continued to write while married to her wayward second husband, Lord Russell, and...

It’s thirty years since David Marr wrote his landmark biography of Australian Nobel laureate, novelist Patrick White. In this provocative  and revealing  conversation, Marr reflects on his relationship with his subject and its  enduring impact on him, admitting that  although White could be a curmudgeon, Marr came to adore him. He talks about the significance of White&rsq...

For the first time, in Miss Dior, British biographer Justine Picardie tells the unknown story of couturier Christian Dior’s younger sister, Catherine, and her courage as a member of the French resistance during the Occupation. With unparalleled access to the Dior archives and homes, Picardie builds a portrait of the close relationship between brother and sister during the war and the terribl...

Kathleen Kennedy was JFK’s beloved sister. They shared a unique combination of physical charisma and personal charm, and a passion for politics and people. And they both had tragic, untimely deaths. In 'KICK' , Paula Byrne’s affectionate biography, Kick comes to life as a woman of irreverent wit, who defied her formidable mother to marry out of her religion and into the British aristoc...

Gillian Mears lived and loved with uninhibited intensity and produced novels about rural Australia written in prose that was poetic and visceral, in a unique combination of gritty and mythical award-winning novels and short stories. She also had a shrewd and playful sense of posterity. When she left a vast archive to the State Library of NSW, it was with the clear intention that one day, a biograp...

Setting off into the remotest corners of the outback in her campervan, Eleanor Hogan retraces the journeys of controversial self-styled ethnologist Daisy Bates and gung-ho journalist Ernestine Hill, investigating the contested dynamic of their writing collaboration on the 1938 international bestseller, The Passing of the Aborigines .  From today’s perspective, many of their ideas seem r...

British biographer and monarchist Andrew Lownie exposes the character flaws in two of the most glamorous but morally dubious couples in the history of the Royal family - the Mountbattens and the Windsors. The Mountbattens - Louis and Edwina - share charisma, ambition and privilege as Viceroy and Vicereine of India in the turbulent period leading up to Partition. Their open marriage  and numer...

In Joan of Arc : A History, media-savvy medievalist Helen Castor goes back to original sources to strip away the myth from the story of Joan of Arc. What emerges from her forensic approach is a fresh take on the remarkable events that led to an illiterate teenage peasant girl being placed in command of the French Army. Castor is bold in her interpretation of Joan’s voices and sheds new light...

Born in the former Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard became one of Britain’s most celebrated playwrights, famous for his wit and intellectual dazzle in plays like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia, and more recently Leopoldstadt. He wears success well, mixing with famous and glamorous friends, marrying talented women and breaking up with them amicably. As he grows...