Biographers in Conversation

By GabriellaArts Books

Biographers in Conversation episodes

March 18Lucy Sussex & Megan Brown "Outrageous Fortunes: A Double Life of Crime"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Lucy Jane Sussex and Megan Brown chat with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-Writer, and Her Criminal Son George
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Outrageous Fortunes was co-authored after a 25-year conversation, combining Lucy’s 35 years of research with Megan’s PhD research.
Lucy and Megan employed a revisionist approach to correct the record about Mary Fortune, arguing that women’s voices are undervalued.
Why Mary Fortune’s and George Fortune’s stories were blended as ‘one story’.
How Lucy and Megan employed ‘sideways research’ when direct evidence was missing.
How Lucy and Megan resisted dramatisation and fictionalisation, instead relying on contemporary newspaper accounts and court records.
How Lucy and Megan borrowed the title Outrageous Fortunes from Shakespeare to reflect scandalous lives and the Victorian ‘topsy-turvy’ puzzle metaphor that shaped their narrative structure
41 min
March 11Dava Sobel "The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dava Sobel chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Dava Sobel used the periodic table as the structural framework, with each chapter keyed to an element that represents a period of Curie’s life or scientific work.
Dava selected the title The Elements of Marie Curie to emphasise how the chemical elements shaped her discoveries and personal life.
Dava wrote in the first person as Marie Curie, translating her letters into English though preserving her voice and perspective to create an immersive narrative.
Dava traced the path for women in science by highlighting generations of women mentored by Curie, showing her enduring influence beyond her own research.
Dava created a chemical chronology that parallels scientific discoveries with biography, such as linking radium extraction to gruelling lab work.
Dava ended with ‘Carbon’ to reflect on Curie’s legacy and the organic, interconnected nature of her scientific and humanitarian impact.
46 min
March 04Jacqueline Kent "Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Jacqueline Kent chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Jacqueline Kent traces the ‘missing generation’ of Australian radical women writers, who bridged the gap between suffragists and second-wave feminism.
These writers were politically active and formally transgressive, challenging norms in both their activism and subject matter.
The collective-biography form enables Kent to show how these women intersected through organisations like the Fellowship of Australian Writers, the Society of Women Writers and the Commonwealth Literary Fund, creating fragile but vital support networks in otherwise isolated domestic lives.
Kent insists these ‘inconvenient women’ speak directly to the present, reminding listeners that structural sexism, economic inequality and workplace predation persist, even as a new generation of women refuses to accept discrimination as the norm.
36 min
February 25Mark Hussey "Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Mark Hussey chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel was published exactly 100 years after Virginia Woolf’s famous novel appeared.
Why Mark Hussey portrayed Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway as a living subject with its own life story.
Why Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel is considered as an object biography.
Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel follows Woolf’s story chronologically from its first creative stirrings in her diary through conception, writing, drafting, revision, publication, early reviews, and onward throughout its extraordinary afterlife, which continues today.
How Woolf’s earliest notes from 6 October 1922 reveal she knew from the outset that ‘all must converge upon the party at the end’.
How Mrs Dalloway inspired creative works such as novels set on a single day, films, an opera, plays, cartoons, memes, tattoos and songs.
1 hr 4 min
February 18Nicholas Boggs "Baldwin: A Love Story"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Nicholas Boggs chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Baldwin: A Love Story.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why Nicholas Boggs structured the biography around Baldwin’s four great loves rather than chronology.
Baldwin’s frank acknowledgment that his novels were driven by autobiographical impulses gave Boggs rare biographical licence to connect fiction to life without making reductive one-to-one correlations between characters and real people.
Retracing Baldwin’s footsteps to Corsica, Istanbul and the south of France proved essential for capturing sensory details like the smell of maquis plants that connected biographer to subject across time.
Boggs challenged the prevailing image of Baldwin as either a civil rights icon or a tragic figure, instead revealing he died at 63 surrounded by his great loves.
The biography’s epilogue deliberately intervenes in Baldwin’s posthumous reputation, joining a chorus of scholars and writers working to dismantle the narrative of creative decline that attached itself to Baldwin’s later years, reorienting readers toward the enduring power of his voice and vision.
44 min
February 11Francesca Wade "Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Francesca Wade chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife was sparked by Francesca’s access to previously unpublished Leon Katz interview transcripts with Alice B. Toklas, revealing how Gertrude Stein deliberately constructed her public persona and how Toklas spent 20 years stewarding Stein’s posthumous legacy as instructed by Stein’s will.
Francesca challenges the conventional biographical form by structuring the narrative in two parts: first telling Stein’s life story as she presented it, then interrogating and deepening that account through posthumous archival discoveries, dramatising how biographical knowledge is constructed rather than simply discovered.
Francesca deliberately exposes the archival ‘workings’ behind biography, showing how Yale archivist Donald Gallup’s negotiations with Toklas over burning love letters and sealing documents shaped what future generations could know about Stein’s life and her relationships.
The central enigma Francesca explores is Stein’s binary reputation: celebrated as either a radical modernist writer or merely a personality symbolising 1920s Paris bohemia. This tension frustrated Stein in her lifetime and continues to complicate her literary legacy.
Francesca concludes that biography is fundamentally an artificial and odd enterprise of converting life’s messiness into linear narrative, with every sentence representing a decision shaped by the biographer’s attitudes and biases. This makes biographical practice itself worthy of interrogation and experimentation
54 min
February 04Lance Richardson "True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation Lance Richardson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Lance Richardson approached the biography with a central thesis question: how did Matthiessen develop his unique sensibility that allowed him to move fluidly between science and spirituality, treating them as complementary rather than mutually incompatible worldviews?
The biography’s unauthorised status liberated Richardson to tell the unvarnished truth without contractual obligations to polish Matthiessen’s legacy.
Richardson’s methodology prioritised archival evidence over potentially fallible memories, deliberately presenting conflicting accounts from sources rather than reconciling them artificially, which he considers fiction and a biographical pitfall.
How retracing Matthiessen’s trek to Nepal’s Crystal Monastery enabled Richardson to viscerally understand the elemental spaces where Matthiessen shed ego and responsibilities to access his most authentic self.
Richardson deliberately avoided portraying Matthiessen as a unified self, instead showing how his fractured personas were all manifestations of the same restless search for meaning and true nature.
The biography’s ethical framework prioritised truth-telling about Matthiessen’s serial infidelities and neglect while giving substantial narrative space to Maria Matthiessen and other women to speak in their own words, resisting the biographical tradition of relegating wives to background roles.
The epilogue’s focus on Matthiessen’s Zen teachings about death and essential mind provided closure for a biography about a fundamentally unresolved life.
46 min
January 28Frances Wilson "Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Frances Wilson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
How Muriel Spark’s first 39 turbulent years provided the raw material for her fiction.
Frances Wilson’s discovery of Spark’s games, puzzles and anagrams, including the invented ‘doppelganger’, Nita McEwen, whose name conceals the chilling phrase, Twin Menace.
Wilson structured Electric Spark around Spark’s ‘four Marys’ and the Scottish ballad tradition, tracing how Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Shelley, Mary Stranger and Marie Stopes shaped Spark’s imagination.
The spooky permeability between life and art: Spark’s belief she lived in the future tense, her ‘evil eye’ and the uncanny way events in her novels repeatedly echoed in her own life.
How during her four-month sprint writing Electric Spark, Wilson could feel Spark’s hand on her own, mirroring Spark’s own accounts of tuning into ‘voices in the air’.
The ethical and imaginative challenges of writing biography about an inveterate trickster: reading between the lines of Curriculum Vitae and Loitering with Intent, embracing contradiction, and accepting that any life of Spark can only ever offer one powerful version of the truth, if at all.
56 min
January 21Summer Series - Stephen J. Campbell: ”Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life”
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation’s special summer season, Dr Stephen J. Campbell chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why Stephen Campbell resists the urge to create a seamless narrative and instead embraces the mystery, silence and gaps in Leonardo da Vinci’s story.
How the book’s structure reflects the fragmented reality of Leonardo’s life.
The origin of the book’s title and how it challenges traditional biographical expectations by leaning into ambiguity.
How Campbell uses philosophical chapter titles and historical nuance to explore mythmaking and modern interpretations of Leonardo da Vinci.
Why Campbell avoids speculation and instead invites readers to sit with what we don’t know, treating uncertainty as revealing rather than inconvenient.
The biographer’s role as a curator of questions rather than authority, a model of life writing that prioritises transparency over certainty.
The myths the book gently dismantles, from the lonely genius trope to misconceptions about Leonardo’s inventions and personality.
How An Untraceable Life encourages us to rethink what biography can be and to rediscover awe in the unresolvable aspects of a life.
48 min
January 14Susan Wyndham "Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower"
In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Susan Wyndham chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why Susan Wyndham opened the biography with Elizabeth Harrower’s late-life renaissance.
The meaning of the title: ‘The Woman in the Watchtower.’
Details of Susan’s exhaustive archival research.
How studying Trove, divorce papers and criminal records enabled Susan to fill gaps in the historical record.
How cross-referencing Harrower’s letters to multiple recipients revealed how she presented different versions of herself to various people.
How Susan Wyndham wove literary criticism throughout the narrative.
Why Susan is mostly invisible in the narrative.
1 hr

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…