Biographers in Conversation

By GabriellaArts Books

Biographers in Conversation episodes

August 06The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sophia Lambton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why the narrative opened with a prologue about Maria Callas’s artistry.
How exhaustive research revealed Callas’s brilliance and flaws.
How a detailed calendar of events, letters and performances tracked Callas’s evolving thoughts.
How Sophia built comprehensive files by transcribing and translating all of Callas’s interviews.
Why chapter headings include Callas’s own words.
How Sophia dismantled Callas’s ‘diva stereotype’ and portrayed her human story.
54 min
July 30Fourteen Ways of Looking
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Erin Vincent chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Fourteen Ways of Looking.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
In Fourteen Ways of Looking, Erin Vincent revisits the tragic year when both her parents were killed in a motor vehicle accident. She was 14.
Erin began noticing the number 14 recurring in books, films and news, prompting her to record these instances until they formed a 2,000-word essay and eventually a full manuscript.
The narrative is fragmented rather than linear.
Every fragment contains a reference to the number 14, drawn from history, literature, or memory, and each is deliberately paired with the fragment before and after it to create subtle, sometimes cryptic connections.
Erin describes the compositional process as a ‘crazy jigsaw puzzle’, holding hundreds of shards of memory and fact in her head, aided only by notebooks and a highlighter pen.
Erin discusses the active, layered function of white space on the page, which she uses to represent silences, omissions and the unspeakable, letting absence do the emotional work instead of over-explaining feeling.
Erin reflects on ending the book with her mother’s voice from an old cassette recording
Erin offers advice to aspiring fragment-writers: experiment freely, read widely in the form and use constraints as a source of creative freedom.
39 min
July 22Clever Men
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Martin Thomas chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Clever Men: How Worlds Collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Martin Thomas’s research began in the ABC’s sound archive, where he stumbled upon recordings made during the 1948 American Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, an expedition he had never heard of.
Martin chose the group biography form to capture the expedition’s internal tensions.
Frank Setzler led the collection of human remains from Indigenous mortuary sites, shipping them to the Smithsonian. Martin describes this as a kind of kidnapping: displaced spirits in a foreign land.
Martin made repeated research trips to Arnhem Land, showing digitised expedition films and recordings to community elders. Old men wept with joy at seeing ancestors and ceremonies on film.
Clever Men ends in the early 21st century with the repatriation of the human remains, led by the late elder Jacob Nayinggull, a man Martin describes as one of the true clever men of the story, and one of his most important mentors.
The title’s double meaning Clever Men is an Aboriginal English term for a shaman or spiritual healer. Martin explains how the title emerged from an incident in which local Arnhem Land people watched a mammalogist shoot, skin and stuff animals, concluding this westerner must be a powerful clever man from another world. The irony is intentional.
Biography assumes a Western sense of self: names, birth dates, individual identity. In Bininj and Yolŋu culture, the dead aren’t named during mourning, numerical dates aren’t used, and the self is understood through a spirit that belongs to country and returns to it.
44 min
July 16Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: Gwen and Augustus John
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Judith Mackrell, one of Britain’s most eminent biographers, chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries is the first major dual biography of Gwen and Augustus John, siblings who became two of the most significant British artists of the 20th century.
The death of Augusta, Gwen and Augustus’s mother, left the young children emotionally bereft, creating in Augustus a compulsive pattern of falling in love with new women, and in Gwen an intense, sometimes obsessive yearning directed at unattainable figures such as the French sculptor, François Auguste René Rodin.
Judith challenges the assumption that Augustus’s fame damaged Gwen’s career. Instead, he was his sister’s most devoted advocate and correctly prophesied that history would one day remember him as Gwen’s brother.
By choosing a dual biography, Judith could use both siblings as a ‘marvellous laboratory’, tracking year by year the social, cultural and economic forces that propelled Augustus to fame rapidly while Gwen remained largely unseen, illuminating the structural barriers facing women artists.
Judith came to understand Gwen’s famous reclusive shyness as a form of armour, a deliberate self-presentation that gave her control over who she engaged with, contradicted by her ferocious capacity for emotional pursuit and sustained creative work.
Judith describes herself as a ‘gardener’ rather than an ‘architect’ of narrative. She begins drafting the manuscript almost from the start of the research, finding that structure emerges organically, with serendipitous connections between the two lives surprising her along the way.
For Judith, writing about artists means foregrounding the people, not just the work, asking how two desolate children became artists, and what the interaction was between their art and their lives.
44 min
July 09Dr Sylvia Martin "Double Act: Eirene Mort & Nora Kate Weston"
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Sylvia Martin chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Double Act: Eirene Mort and Nora Kate Weston.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
While Eirene Mort was a designer, black & white illustrator, watercolourist, etcher, tapestry worker and potter, Nora Kate Weston, whom Eirene named ‘Chips’, was a carpenter, woodcarver and metalworker. They lived and worked together for 60 years early in the 20th century.
Sylvia Martin crafted a dual biography because Nora had been consistently relegated to the shadows given the higher public profile of Eirene. Double Act is an act of biographical justice to bring Nora into equal focus with Eirene.
The Eirene Mort archive at the National Library of Australia is almost entirely visual. It includes over 20 sketchbooks, objects and artworks, though no letters between Eirene and Nora. Sylvia read their lives through images, travel sketches and lateral sources, including shipping lists and newspaper archives on Trove.
Influenced by her own experience of coming out as a lesbian in the 1980s and finding no narratives that fit, Sylvia has spent 35 years writing about women in same-sex relationships from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Double Act is Sylvia’s fifth book and contains more of herself than any previous work.
37 min
July 02Cynthia Banham "Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance"
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Cynthia Banham chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
A hybrid of biographical reimagining, lyrical memoir and transnational family history, Mother Shadow is poetic, with whimsical detours and meditative qualities.
The discovery of a torn 1898 birth certificate Cynthia found in a small packet of rescued family documents revealed that her great-grandmother Natalina wasn’t an orphan but a foundling, abandoned by her mother Ersilia, an unmarried peasant woman.
Mother Shadow follows two interwoven emotional journeys: Cythnia’s detective-like quest to understand why Ersilia gave up Natalina, and her own reckoning with feelings of maternal inadequacy.
Mother Shadow underwent many structural drafts before a mentor helped Cynthia to reorganise it thematically, weaving resonances between Ersilia’s 19th-century story and Banham’s own contemporary experience of mothering.
When an anthropologist raised the possibility of family abuse as an explanation for Ersilia’s circumstances, Cynthia agonised over whether to include it. Ultimately, she decided that honesty about confronting possibilities was an ethical obligation.
Cynthia’s advice for authors crafting hybrid forms of life writing is to understand why a story grabs them before they embark on the project because the answer is part of the story itself. ‘Start writing early, embrace many drafts, and understand that uncovering family history means navigating the question of who owns the past’, Cynthia suggests. ‘Not everyone in a family will answer the same way.’
43 min
June 25Sheryle Bagwell "Letter from Provence: Two Women, Two Centuries and a Village House in France"
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sheryle Bagwell chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Letter from Provence: Two Women, Two Centuries and a Village House in France.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Sheryle Bagwell explains how the chance discovery of a dust-covered volume of Madame de Sévigné’s letters in her Provençal attic became the catalyst for a story she had been unconsciously preparing to write for several decades.
Sheryle reveals that the ‘two women’ of the subtitle are her mother Judith and Madame de Sévigné, a distinction that reframes the emotional architecture of the story.
Sheryle describes how Madame de Sévigné, writing before the age of newspapers, effectively functioned as the world’s first blogger, giving her intimate circle and ultimately history, eyewitness accounts of Louis XIV’s court through letters she knew were being read aloud and passed around.
Sheryle describes the discovery that her mother Judith and Madame de Sévigné had striking parallels. Both were feisty and both died without their daughters present, which became the emotional spine of the story.
Sheryle reflects on writing the book later in life as an intentional choice: ‘I don’t think I could have written this book in mid-career’, she said. ‘I needed the wisdom that comes later in life to honestly reckon with a childhood shaped by domestic violence and a mother who never got to escape it.’
Sheryle closes the story with a letter to her mother written from Provence, which she describes as the first letter she ever wrote to her mother, and the one the entire story was always travelling towards.
34 min
June 18Nigel Hamilton "Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Nigel Hamilton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Lincoln vs. Davis is the first dual biography to examine how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis fought each other as presidents and commanders-in-chief of their respective forces, the Union and the Confederacy, during the American Civil War.
Lincoln and Davis coincidentally began train journeys to their Presidential inaugurations on the same day.
By framing emancipation as a military order during a national emergency rather than civilian legislation, Lincoln legally freed 3.5 million enslaved people and ensured no European power would ever recognise the Confederacy, dooming Davis’s rebellion.
Frustrated that historians have covered up crucial details and failed to explain why Lincoln delayed emancipation for nearly two years, Nigel Hamilton crafted Lincoln vs. Davis to correct the historical record, practising what he refers to as ‘biography as corrective’.
48 min
June 11Zachary Leader "Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Zachary Leader chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Richard Ellmann’s biography of the novelist James Joyce is considered the greatest literary biography of the 20th century.
Why Zachary Leader was inspired to craft Ellmann’s Joyce.
Why Ellmann’s Joyce is structured in two sections: a chronological life of Richard Ellmann followed by a thematic ‘making of James Joyce’s biography’ section.
Why Zachary opened the narrative with a chapter defending literary biography.
Why Zachary portrayed Ellmann’s James Joyce as both scholarship and art, foregrounding Ellmann’s narrative craft, wit and realist virtues.
Why Ellmann’s Joyce is a practical masterclass in biography.
47 min
June 03Micaela Sahhar "Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family"
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Micaela Sahhar chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
The death of Micaela Sahhar’s grandmother’s last surviving sister created a sense of urgency for Micaela to capture her Palestinian family’s stories before they slipped beyond living memory.
With many primary sources destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, Micaela learned to read absence as a form of evidence, drawing on object memory, fragments, photographs, and ephemeral archives to reconstruct what official records could not.
Micaela’s grandfather’s late-life oral history tapes were a vital source of historical and family information. They looped between present and past, between stories and digressions and became a structural model for the encyclopaedic, non-linear form of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate.
In 2023, Micaela visited Jerusalem to retrace her family’s footsteps through the Old City. She recalls that walking the actual terrain, up hills, distances and ordinary neighbourhoods, brought a present-tense vividness to the story.
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is structured as a 48-entry encyclopaedia spanning four generations of Micaela’s Palestinian family, from the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Palestinian community of Melbourne.
53 min

About Biographers in Conversation

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Biographer Gabriella Kelly-Davies chats with biographers across the world about the myriad of choices they make while researching, writing and publishing life stories. In every episode, she explores…