Final Draft - Great Conversations

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Chris Ames is a writer from California, who now lives in Melbourne. He is the 2025 winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. And we now are the beneficiaries as we discover his short story collection I Made This Just For You.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Christy Anne Jones is an author, illustrator and content creator. Her debut novel is Theodora’s Tea Shop

Dorothy has always dreamed of magic, but across Calleum magic has been banned and only the most privileged can obtain a license for its use.

In desperation Dorothy flees to the capital Alliaster in search of a fabled Tea Shop, said to be the home of a grand witch Theodora. Dorothy dreams that Theodora will help her learn magic, never dreaming of the vast and dangerous world she is about to enter.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Mirandi Riwoe is the author of Sunbirds, The Fish Girl, and Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which won the Queensland Literary Award – Fiction Book Award and the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. 

Mirandi joins us with her new novel A Short History of Longans

Across four generations A Short History of Longans tells the story of a family.

In the near future Daniel lives a solitary life; trapped by his past.

In the year 2000 Wendy tries to connect to her family even as her memory is gradually stripped away.

In post war America, Ruby fears she may never get back to Australia. 

And in the mid nineteenth century, Maria and Ah Yang are drawn together to begin the whole saga.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

KRIS KNEEN is an award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Their latest book is Rite of Spring, and Kris is joining us today to discuss.

Miranda and Richard land on the shore of a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. 

On paper they are there as caretakers for the old lighthouse and its infrastructure.

To each other they might acknowledge a deeper purpose; to restore or renew something of their relationship.

And then there is Miranda’s reasons; something deeper and more instinctual

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Allee Richards is the author of Small Joys of Real Life and A Light in the Dark. She joins us today with her new novel Tight Lines

Luke, Matty and Josh live for the water; swimming, surfing, fishing. Their coastal lives look idyllic. Every summer Millie completes the group as they barrel towards adulthood.

The end of school arrives with all its relief and release and adult plans are tomorrow’s problem when there’s a party on tonight. 

And then everything changes…

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese diaspora author, screenwriter and award-winning social advocate. Yassmin has joined us on Final Draft in the past discussing her essays in Talking About a Revolution and her children’s novel Listen Layla. Today she is joining us with her literary fiction debut, At Sea. 

Zainab has spent her life on oil rigs living the fly in fly out life. When her boss calls her back from leave to investigate strange goings on on the rig Clarissa Clyde, she knows this could be her big break. 

Joining a rig near the end of a drill isn’t easy. As a woman on the rigs Zainab knows she won’t get an easy ride, let alone an open door to the mysteries plaguing the Clarissa Clyde. She is determined though, and haunted by her bosses words, ‘Make sure everyone gets out alive’.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Ilka Tampke is an award-winning author, academic and teacher. Her first two novels, Skin and Songwoman explore the druidic culture of Ancient Britain and its disruption by Roman colonisation.

Ilka joins us with her latest novel How to Love the World

After a horrible morning and a fight with her kids Nellika takes to a trail near her home to ease her soul and release her frustration in nature.

Awakening in pain, pinned to the ground, Nellika finds she is trapped under a fallen branch.

Does she have three days, or three hours, and what could this injury mean for her life. Stuck in the limbo of uncertainty.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.

Johanna Bell is an award winning author of fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her new novel Department of the Vanishing won the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript.

For more than twenty years Ava has toiled away at the Department of Vanishing cataloguing species as they go extinct. The pace of the work has been increasing and as is always the case there’s never enough hands.

Humanity is on the brink of a mass extinction event. Birdsong is falling silent and people didn’t even notice it disappearing. It’s Ava’s job to archive the remains, even as her personal life teeters.

But in her dying mother’s confused words Ava finds something. Maybe hope. Maybe a clue to the mystery of her father, long missing, and a song that contains more than any might assume…

Department of the Vanishing is a visually innovative novel that weaves a mystery around just about the saddest thing I can think of. I love the birds that visit my house and as I read I couldn’t bear to think of not hearing the Magpie’s warble, or the chittering of the Galah calling me out to give it some seed. 

Casting the end of birdsong as the emotional heart of the novel was effective at getting me hooked on the mystery and serves as an interesting plot point as we come to realise the most versatile call of all may lurk deep within the department. There is a resonance to the idea that silence falling is the advance call of life ending.

Through Ava we get a sense that the world isn’t doing ok. She’s over worked at living behind a massage parlour where the women are wonderful but the ambiance is lacking. Her partner is a dick and now the natural world is dwindling to so-much space in manila folders available to those ready to parade through the archives. Bureaucracy gone mild. 

The book itself is crafted as a kind of off-kilter file. Imagine a cork board linked by red twine and you’re on your way to imagining Ava collection. It is through these disparate files, recordings, and police reports that the reader is offered the opportunity to get to the heart of the mystery. Ava’s sure there’s more to all of this death and destruction, and that it’s somehow linked to her family. To the disappearance of her father all those years ago.

As I read I knew that this was something unique. Moreover, Department of the Vanishing wasn’t going to serve itself up to me, I would have to work to figure it out. If you enjoy creative fiction, zines, and interactive texts, this one’s for you.

Antoun Issa is a Lebanese-Australian journalist and co-founder of Deepcut News.

Antoun has a new book out entitled Rebirth and with the byline a “Love Story from the depths of war.” Rebirth chronicles Antoun’s mothers experiences of the beginnings of the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and her subsequent migration to Australia.

The novel centers around the experience of the pseudonymously named Khalil family and their eldest daughter Laila. Laila works as a seamstress, supporting her father’s income for the family and giving her some small degree of autonomy in moving around Beirut between home and her work. Laila is of an age when her family would be seeking a match, and for her to marry, but Laila is jealous of her independence, her role as a support to her family, and is also secretly in love with the handsome hairdresser she sees coming to and from work.

Laila might reasonably worry about the approval of her family and the politics of relationships in a close knit community. When war breaks out and factions around the city close off territories she comes to understand that simple things such as living and dying can be easily overturned by desperate men with guns. In a short while she will see her life and her love transformed utterly.

Rebirth is a deeply personal and tremendously affecting novel. In crafting the book Antoun Issa meticulously crafted stories from locals in Beirut and his  mother’s own reminiscences. He takes these interviews and transforms them into a vibrant narrative evoking both the history of the time, but also something of the community and what is being lost as it is felt by those who would come to mourn it eternally.

When I read the book it was against the backdrop of a new war unfolding in Lebanon, with invading Israeli forces uprooting town much as Rebirth describes the uprooting and displacement of the Khalil family. As that conflict escalates I turn again to Rebirth as a source for understanding what is at stake and the generational trauma visited on those who are driven from their lands.

Rebirth is a vessel for that memory. It is also a testament to the humanity of the people who are caught in the middle of conflict. Those who become casualties but often don’t get memorialised as the fighters do because they are poor, or not strategically important in the schemes of little men with big guns.

This is an incredible work of narrative non-fiction and a generous invitation to all readers to understand both the history and the personal consequence of a decades long conflict seared into the hearts of so many Lebanese diaspora across the world and in Australia. 

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Katherine Johnson is the author of five novels including Matryoshka and Paris Savages. Katherine’s latest Every Wild Soul is the inaugural winner of The Australian Fiction Prize and Katherine is joining us to discuss today.

To the world Maria Island is a paradise; an ecological wonderland off the coast of Tasmania. At eighteen years old Maria is all she’s known for so much of her life. She loves the beauty and the chance to learn about biodiversity, but she’s also conscious her life doesn’t look like other girls and that maybe she’d like to change that. 

Min’s father Piers has other ideas though. Ever since his wife left him he’s been determined to protect his daughter. Protection can look a lot like control though, so when a storm blows over Maria it promises more than a few ill winds for the residents.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.