Biographers in Conversation

By GabriellaArts Books

Biographers in Conversation episodes

May 26Karen Fang "Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong"
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Professor Karen Fang chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Karen Fang explains why only a full-length biography could do justice to Tyrus Wong’s 106-year life that encompassed his achievements across fine art, animation, Hollywood storyboarding, greeting cards and kite-making.
Karen reveals that the title Background Artist is Tyrus Wong’s Disney credit in the original 1942 release of the movie Bambi.
Among the most revealing archival discoveries was Tyrus Wong’s personal correspondence that showed a wickedly funny, warm and creatively restless person that no formal interview could have captured.
Karen reveals how Tyrus Wong’s signature visual style, rooted in Chinese brush painting technique and aesthetic heritage, transformed racial difference from a liability into an artistic asset, enabling him to succeed in a society that otherwise offered very little opportunity to Chinese Americans.
The closing passages of Background Artist tie together the themes of visibility, immigration and artistic legacy, ending with the line Karen says came directly from her conversations with Tyrus Wong’s daughters: ‘Tyrus was always simply an artist.’
52 min
May 20Debra Adelaide "When I Am Sixty-Four"
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, award-winning author Dr Debra Adelaide chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting When I Am Sixty-Four.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
When I Am Sixty-Four is a tender, poignant story based on Debra Adelaide’s lifelong friendship with the award-winning author, Gabrielle Carey.
When I Am Sixty-Four began not as a planned book but as a single vivid memory that arrived unbidden while she was working on another project; it simply refused to let go.
A work of extraordinary depth and grace, When I Am Sixty-Four is crafted as autofiction, a hybrid genre that blurs the line between fiction and autobiography.
Debra defines autofiction as writing memoir using the tools of narrative fiction, shaping, rearranging, condensing, and inventing to reach for a broader emotional truth.
Debra explains her decision not to name Gabrielle or anyone else in the book, wanting readers to bring their own experiences of loving someone in despair to the narrative.
Debra describes the story’s mosaic structure of vignettes as entirely instinctive. The final tragic months of her friend’s life provide a loose chronological spine, while memories from their 50 years of shared history were weaved in.
The story’s dark humour, Debra explains, was both an authentic expression of who Gabrielle Carey was, a woman with an extraordinary laugh, and a deliberate way of honouring her.
46 min
May 13Troy Bramston: "Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Troy Bramston chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. This is the first full biography of Gough Whitlam, a former Australian Prime Minister, since his death in 2014.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
The biography’s subtitle The Vista of the New came from a poem Gough Whitlam wrote in 1934 as a student at Canberra Grammar School. In it, he imagines a bolder brighter future for Australia.
The biography’s central theme is political leadership.
Troy Bramston is interested in how power is gained, used and lost.
Gough Whitlam’s school reports noted his difficulty getting along with others. These interpersonal failures would contribute to his downfall decades later.
Troy argues that Whitlam was not a man of destiny but a man of history, driven not by a sense of predestination but by a hunger to change Australia’s direction.
Troy makes a compelling case for advancing the biographical subject. Continually asking what is new, he argues that a biography that doesn’t tell us something we didn’t know before, however well written, fails to fully justify itself.
58 min
May 06Ian Hembrow: "Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Ian Hembrow chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees is the first full-length English biography of Anders Celsius, a modest Swedish astronomer who quietly revolutionised our understanding of the natural world.
Ian Hembrow’s accidental discovery of Celsius’s story in 2016 sparked a years’-long quest that led him to the Arctic Circle, retracing Celsius’s 1736–37 expedition to measure the shape of the Earth.
Celsius’s story is set against the backdrop of the European Enlightenment, illustrating how he thrived in the vibrant 18th-century scientific community while unlocking fundamental mysteries of nature.
Ian Hembrow draws connections to the present, noting that Celsius, who is best known for inventing the 100-point centigrade temperature scale, now lends his name to global climate targets as humanity strives to limit warming to 1.5°C.
How Ian Hembrow delves into Celsius’s human story, sharing the personal struggles and triumphs behind his scientific achievements and offering a poignant reminder that even great scientific minds face immense personal challenges.
The relevance of Celsius’s story today, reminding us of the crucial role of scientific inquiry and our shared responsibility to use knowledge wisely as we face urgent challenges like climate change.
43 min
April 29Hester Kaplan: "Twice Born: Finding My Father In the Margins of Biography"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Hester Kaplan chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Twice Born: Finding My Father In the Margins of Biography.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
The catalyst for crafting Twice Born was the death of Hester’s father, the biographer Justin Kaplan. Hester realised she had lost the chance to ask her father the questions that had always eluded her during his lifetime.
Rather than being a conventional biography, Twice Born blends biography, memoir, and fiction, a structure Kaplan chose deliberately to view her father from many different angles and points of view, enabling her to know him in ways impossible while he was alive.
Kaplan discovered that her father chose Mark Twain as his biographical subject because of deep personal parallels that included an early loss of parents, a traumatic childhood and an identity reinvented through writing. Hester insists that biographers inevitably choose subjects who mirror their own inner lives.
Kaplan reflects on how memory and fiction blur once put on the page.
Because Justin Kaplan always wrote behind closed study doors, his daughter uses fiction to imaginatively enter that space and reconstruct his writing process.
45 min
April 22Helen Pitt: "The House" and "Luna Park"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Helen Pitt chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The House: The dramatic story of the Sydney Opera House and the people who made it and Luna Park: The extraordinary story of the showmen, shysters and schemers who built Sydney’s famous fun park.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
The catalyst for The House was hearing of the death of Sydney Opera House architect Jørn Utzon. Helen Pitt realised his tragic story deserved retelling for a new generation.
Helen restored the largely forgotten story of Peter Hall, the Australian architect who completed the interiors of Sydney Opera House after Utzon’s dramatic departure in 1966.
Luna Park began taking shape in 2019, driven by Helen’s desire to uncover the dark history lurking beneath one of Sydney’s most joyful facades.
The Ghost Train fire of 9 June 1979, which killed six children and one father, sits at the heart of Luna Park. Helen presents compelling evidence that the potential crime scene was bulldozed within 24 hours, making the truth perhaps permanently unknowable.
Helen cites Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City as her primary model for novelistic nonfiction, employing scene-setting, dialogue and granular detail to bring history viscerally alive.
52 min
April 15Paul Kildea: "Chopin’s Piano: A Journey through Romanticism"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Paul Kildea chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Chopin’s Piano: A Journey through Romanticism.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Paul Kildea’s inspiration for crafting Chopin’s Piano. A Journey through Romanticism.
The significance of the biography’s title.
The relevance of Chopin’s Piano: A Journey through Romanticism today.
Chopin’s primitive piano was crafted by Juan Bouwer, an amateur artisan in Palma, Majorca, in 1838.
Juan Bouwer had no inkling his humble instrument would become the catalyst for Chopin composing six of his 24 Preludes on the piano.
Why Chopin’s Piano’s 24-chapter structure mirrors Chopin’s two books of 12 Preludes.
Musica Viva adapted Chopin’s Piano as a national touring production in 2023, blending all 24 Preludes with storytelling.
40 min
April 08Sara Fitzgerald "The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sara Fitzgerald chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
How the secret letters T.S. Eliot wrote to Emily Hale revealed an intimate 27-year correspondence (1930-1957) that confirmed Hale’s profound influence on his poetry.
How Eliot’s destruction of Emily’s letters to him silenced her voice.
Despite being relegated to footnote status in Eliot’s life, Emily taught drama at prominent colleges such as Smith College, acted in amateur theatre with future Broadway stars and maintained a rich independent life.
How Eliot’s secret letter to Harvard revealed a nasty counter-narrative. Eliot’s pre-emptive statement dismissed his relationship.
1 hr 4 min
April 01Dr Theodore Ell "Lebanon Days: Memories of an ancient land through economic meltdown, a revolution of hope and surviving the 2020 Beirut explosion"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Theodore Ell chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Lebanon Days: Memories of an ancient land through economic meltdown, a revolution of hope and surviving the 2020 Beirut explosion.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Theodore Ell reveals how the blended style of Lebanon Days—weaving memoir, cultural history, travel writing, journalism and political analysis—was an organic response to the multi-layered forces he witnessed in Lebanon between 2018 and 2021.
Theo explores the five-part chronological structure of Lebanon Days and the key pivot points that shaped it: arriving as a newcomer, the 2019 revolution, COVID lockdown, the 2020 port explosion, and a sombre farewell.
Theo explains the counterintuitive decision to draft Lebanon Days backwards, beginning with the explosion and working towards his arrival, as an archaeological method for keeping Lebanon, rather than himself, at the centre of the narrative.
Theo introduces his forthcoming authorised biography of the acclaimed poet Les Murray, This Country Is My Mind. It involves studying 65 boxes of archival material he is studying at the National Library of Australia and interviews with over 50 people.
53 min
March 25Deborah FitzGerald "Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Deborah FitzGerald chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why Dorothea Mackellar crafted her iconic poem: ‘I Love a Sunburnt Country’.
Deborah FitzGerald’s inspiration for crafting Her Sunburnt Country.
Why Mackellar was invisible in the historical record, despite the enduring fame of her poem.
How Deborah balanced Mackellar’s literary life with her human story.
How Deborah reconciled Mackellar’s contradictions.
How Deborah balanced imaginative storytelling and historical rigour.
The contemporary relevance of Dorothea Mackellar’s life story.
50 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…