The Readings Podcast

In today’s episode, a conversation with Rebecca Strating and Joanne Wallis, authors of Girt By Sea: Re-Imagining Australia’s Security. Australia has drawn closer to many of its Asia-Pacific neighbours in recent years, but 'when push comes to shove, it continues to look well beyond the oceans and regions that surround it to the distant horizons of Europe and North America for its ultimate security...

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch of Judith Bishop’s Circadia. These fiercely empathetic poems range deep into the woods of present, past and future time. With visionary imagination and rapt musicality, this concluding volume in Bishop's award-winning trilogy on time sings in the mind long after reading.

In this episode, a conversation with Stuart Kells, author of the new book, Alice(TM). This book is the extraordinary story of Alice Corporation, a company created to reimagine financial markets, that brings together an unlikely cast of characters: renowned author Kate Jennings, international banking insider Ian Shepherd, Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, German-born World War II historian Sigrid MacRae,...

In this episode, a conversation with Anna Downes, author of the crime novels The Safe Place, The Shadow House, and now, Red River Road. In this new book, set on the Coral Coast of Western Australia, solo traveller Katy is on a mission to find her free-spirited sister, Phoebe, who disappeared along the same route a year ago. But as she drives her campervan further into the wild north, Katy realises...

In this episode, a conversation with Manisha Anjali, a writer, artist, and teacher, and author of 'Naag Mountain'. This book is a journey across oceans, from the Asian subcontinent to the South Seas, a journey about human trafficking on sugar plantations in Fiji and Australia. Anjali brings to life the histories and events, the stories and myths of a displaced and exploited people, that have been...

In this episode, a conversation with Ouyang Yu, author, translator, academic, and renowned poet. Ouyang Yu’s first collection of stories in English, The White Cockatoo Flowers, is both assured and tender and at times surprisingly funny. It includes stories set in China and Australia that revel in the truth and candour of lived experience and the joys and constraints of language. In this book Ouyan...

In this episode, a conversation with Winnie Dunn – a Tongan-Australian writer, editor, the General Manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, and now author of the novel Dirt Poor Islanders. Dunn’s book is a potent, mesmerising novel that opens our eyes to the brutal fractures navigated when growing up between two cultures and the importance of understanding all the many pieces of yourself. Winnie Du...

In today’s episode, a conversation with Amanda Hampson, author of the runaway crime novel success, The Tea Ladies. Hampson has returned with a sequel, The Cryptic Clue. It’s set in Zig Zag Lane, in the heart of Sydney's rag-trade district, where our intrepid tea ladies, Hazel, Betty and Irene, have their work cut out. Solving a murder, kidnapping and arson case, and outwitting an arch criminal, ea...

In this episode, a conversation with award-winning writer Steven Carroll, author of Death of a Foreign Gentleman, the first book in a series of post-war literary crime novels featuring Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter. Set in Cambridge in 1947, the book is a playful, poignant and absorbing novel, with shades of The Third Man and Brighton Rock, which examines the question of how to live a meaningf...

A new instalment of the Readings Kids Podcast. This episode features some of the members of the Readings Teen Advisory Board engaging in conversation with Tobias Madden, author of the books Anything But Fine and Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell. Madden’s third YA novel, Wrong Answers Only, was recently published in Australia.

In this episode, a conversation with Victoria Vanstone, author of the new memoir, A Thousand Wasted Sundays. The book follows her journey from casual teen drinking to black-outs, boozed-up play dates to learning to live without her reliable social crutch. But it’s not a tale of misery and trauma, it’s the relatable story of a very normal woman with a very ordinary, socially acceptable drinking hab...

In this episode, a conversation with author Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo, recorded live at the launch of her memoir, My Father’s Shadow. Zurbo grew up in thrall to her father, a prominent antiwar activist, brilliant political organiser and covert member of the Communist Party. She adopted his beliefs from an early age, becoming a supporter of the Soviet Union and a peace campaigner. She travelled with h...

An instalment of The Comics Question, a series where Bernard Caleo and I discuss comics, graphic novels, and all manner of illustrated books, zines, and other associated productions. In this episode, Bernard Caleo was joined by Readings bookseller Nick Curnow to give a round-up of some of the most intriguing, beautiful, and thought-provoking comics and graphic novels from 2023. This is part two of...

In this episode, a conversation with journalist and author Marina Kamenev, author of Kin: Family in the 21st Century. While the nuclear family still exists, many more types of kinship surround us. Kin is an investigation into what influences us to have children and the new ways that have made parenthood possible. It delves into the experiences of couples without children, single parents by choice...

In this episode, a conversation with Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital. This is life on our planet as you’ve never seen it before: in this spellbinding and uplifting novel six astronauts rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity? Together they watch their silent blue plane...

In this episode, a conversation with Mykaela Saunders, author of a new collection of short stories, ‘Always Will Be’. Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher and researcher, and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award-winning anthology of First Nations speculative fiction.  Saunders has been awarded numerous prizes for their writing, including the 2022 David Unaipon...

An instalment of The Comics Question, a series where Bernard Caleo and I discuss comics, graphic novels, and all manner of illustrated books, zines, and other associated productions. In this episode, Bernard Caleo was joined by Readings bookseller Nick Curnow to give a round-up of some of the most intriguing, beautiful, and thought-provoking comics and graphic novels from 2023. This is part one of...

In this episode, a conversation with Sonny Jane Wise, a trans, multiply neurodivergent & disabled public speaker, advocate and author. Wise’s most recent book, We’re All Neurodiverse, is an affirming and thoughtful guide to how and why we need to fundamentally shift our thinking about neurodivergent people. Through interviews, narratives, and the lens of their own raw experiences, they consider ho...

In this episode, a conversation with the new Executive Director and CEO of Stella, Fiona Sweet. Stella is a major voice for gender equality and cultural change in Australian literature. Founded in 2012, the organisation’s flagship program is the annual Stella Prize – a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing. Stella also delivers a suite of year-round initiatives which actively...

In this episode, a conversation with Jeanine Leane, Wiradjuri poet, writer and academic. Author of the acclaimed novel Purple Threads, winner of the David Unaipon Award, Leane’s poetry has also been widely awarded and commended across an extensive career as both a writer and a teacher. Her newest book, the poetry collection Gawimarra: Gathering, moves from deeply tender meditations on Country, cul...

In this episode, a conversation with Alex and Stephanie Miller, discussing Miller’s most recent book, A Kind of Confession. The book is a secret look into Alex Miller's writing life, spanning sixty years of creativity and inspiration. As a young man in 1961 Miller left his work as a ringer in Queensland and set out to achieve his dream of becoming a serious novelist. It was not until 1988 that his...

In this episode, a conversation with Damien Linnane: writer, artist, and editor of Paper Chained, an art and writing magazine for prisoners. Linnane’s memoir Raw chronicles a childhood marred by physical and sexual abuse, and a man’s subsequent search for identity in unhealthy places, such as violent gangs and the military.

In this episode, a conversation with Helen Hayward, academic, writer, and author of Home Work. When Helen Hayward had her two children in London, 25 years ago, she found looking after them easy. Loving and looking after her kids was straightforward. However loving and looking after her home was not. She had long been instructed to put her career first. So she did. Yet what to do with the mushroomi...

In this episode, a conversation with Sam Sempill, chef, architect, and now author of Eat Lao: Recipes from a Lao Kitchen. The recipes in this book follow the trail of Sam's grandmother's cooking back to Lao. The food her grandmother cooked has remained a constant in Sam's life, providing her with a connection back to a country she left as a child. They celebrate the uniqueness of the Lao food trad...

In this episode, a conversation recorded at the launch of Raimond Gaita’s Justice and Hope: Essays, Lectures and Other Writings. For more than three decades the incomparable voice of Raimond Gaita has been summoning us to new conversations that deepen our understanding of what matters most to human life and awaken the sense of our common humanity. For Gaita, we are never more fully alive than when...