Final Draft - Great Conversations

Beloved science communicator Dr Karl Kruszelnicki shares with Andrew some incredible takes of how he became the storyteller and communicator he is today!

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.

Jordan Prosser is a writer, filmmaker and performer from Victoria. His short story ‘Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game’ won the Peter Carey Short Story Award in 2022. Big Time is his first novel.

In the Free Republic of East Australia where everything is just bonza and we all toe the line because whatareya a tall poppy or something?!

Julian Ferryman’s been summoned home lest he lose his spot on Bass for his band’s sophomore album. Julian’s not returning alone though; he’s seen the world and the FREA doesn’t love outsider perspectives. Julian’s also seen the future courtesy of the new designer drug ‘F’, but once you’ve seen your future, where does that leave your present? 

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

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Lisa Kenway is an Australian writer and anaesthetist. Her debut novel, All You Took From Me, was longlisted for the 2020 Richell Prize

When Clare wakes in a bed in the hospital where she works as an anesthetist she has only questions.

When doctors inform her she was in a car accident, that it took the life of her beloved husband, she begins to realise how much she has lost. How did it come to this?

Clare can’t remember a thing about the accident. Why were they on the deserted road? Why was Ray wearing chainmail armour? 

As Clare struggles to pull her life back together she is tormented by a towering figure, seemingly stalking her and leaving threatening warnings. The hospital is insisting Clare must see a counselor if she wants to return to work, but it's looking to Clare like she’ll need even more drastic measures if she wants to regain her memories before what she has lost comes back to take what is left.

All You Took From Me is a fascinating exploration into memory and identity. Clare embodies the unreliable narrator and the reader is invited along as she tries to discover if she can even trust herself.

The novel traverses Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains so you know I enjoyed seeing my local area represented. The relative and expanse and solitude of the Mountains is used to effect as the story unfolds and we learn what Clare and her husband had been up to in the days and weeks prior to their accident.

As we follow Clare in her confusion, the tension is ratcheted up by the appearance of her mysterious stalker. There is a certain inelegance to the threats that Clare is in no position to ignore. The rising tension increases the stakes to the point that Clare is willing to try some radical, even desperate means to regain her memory and control over her life. What follows is an innovative exploration of memory and how our subconscious feeds into our everyday.

Clare’s journey of self discovery is suitably fraught and makes for an entertaining look into the depths contained within our seemingly everyday lives.

All You Took From Me is an effective thriller and a must read for lovers of Sydney and surrounds.

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.

Evie Wyld is the award winning author of five novels including the 2021 Stella Prize winning The Bass Rock.

Max waits in the London flat he shares with Hannah. He’s had little to do but wait since he died. He’d never given much consideration to being a ghost and even still it’s not living up to the hype.

Max’s non-corporeal existence is giving him a view into all the things Hannah never told him during their relationship though. Her life before, her life in Australia was always closed to him but now there’s a lot that Hannah must grieve.

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 from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

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Max Porter is the critically acclaimed author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny.

The adults in Shy’s life might describe him as troubled, erratic, violent even. Shy himself doesn’t exactly know why these things keep happening but it’s ended him up in Last Chance, a home for wayward kids, itself on its last legs as developers converge on the property threatening its future.

What does Shy care?! He’s pushed away his mum and his foster dad and now in this haunted old pile he figures he’s not worth much more than a backpack full of stones and a walk to the local pond.

The events of Shy cover a mere few hours of a climactic night in Shy’s life, and yet as he sets out through the window of Last Chance and into the surrounding countryside we are taken on an expansive trip into the confusing and often chaotic world that has brought Shy up to this juncture.

I called Shy’s life chaotic there and it is with style and compassion that Porter brings this chaos onto the page. Both the prose and the typeset veer wildly across the sections evoking thoughts and snatches of conversation. Shy’s confusion and spiraling into the trap of his half realized adolescent life are vividly brought to life even as Shy plods towards a seeming conclusion.

I found the novel both confronting and comforting. Shy is troubled but the novel doesn’t seek to wrap his pain up into a neat bow. The possibility of transformation is elusive and Shy’s fate is a seemingly forgone conclusion; he’s writing himself off as surely as others have written him off.

Shy as ‘angry young man’ let’s you stay angry yourself at the senselessness of angst ridden masculinity whilst also revealing the pathos at its empty core.

This is a slim volume and if you let it, a quick read but the sense that it is reaching for something longer, more tangible is inescapable as you struggle to make sense of the life on the page. 

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.

On today's show Tim Ayliffe is in conversation with the indomitable Felix Shannon

"When Sydney socialite Tottie Evans is found dead at a house in Palm Beach, Detective Holly Sutton is called in to investigate. She immediately suspects the boyfriend,a millionaire property developer and ex-mercenary soldier, who refuses to cooperate with police.

Across the city, old-school reporter John Bailey – still haunted by the death of his girlfriend, former cop Sharon Dexter – gets a call about a break-in. It leads to the unearthing of an old case file on a murder at the men-only Sydney Club that Dexter had been pursuing a decade earlier. Her notes reveal a link between that murder and the killing of Tottie Evans.

Suddenly, John Bailey and Holly Sutton have the same mission. And for Bailey, this is a chance to finish a job for the woman who saved his life.

The only problem: a serial killer is already serving a life sentence for the Sydney Club murder."

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 from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

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Get your favourite bookish costume ready it's time to celebrate Book Week 17th - 23rd August

Celebrate Book Week with a fresh new read and maybe even get dressed up as your favourite character

CBCA Book of the Year Winners:

Book of the Year: Older Readers

Karen Comer - Grace Notes

Book of the Year: Younger Readers

Tristan Bancks - Scar Town

Book of the Year: Early Childhood

Briony Stewart - Gymnastica Fantastica!

Picture Book of the Year

Kelly Canby - Timeless

Eve Pownall Award

Isolde Martyn & Robyn Ridgeway (text), Louise Hogan (illustrator) - Country Town

CBCA Award for New Illustrator

Erica Wagner (text by Johanna Bell) - Hope is the Thing

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.

Belinda Cranston is a Canberra based writer. She’s joining us today with her first novel, The Changing Room.

Rachel has left Australia and is determined to find herself in the world.

When London fails to offer her the adventures she is seeking, Rachel and a friend travel first to Egypt and then into Israel.

Rachel still feels unsure of herself, but surely somewhere in the world she’ll discover the person she’s meant to be?

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 from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Evie Wyld is the award winning author of five novels including the 2021 Stella Prize winning The Bass Rock.

Max waits in the London flat he shares with Hannah. He’s had little to do but wait since he died. He’d never given much consideration to being a ghost and even still it’s not living up to the hype.

Max’s non-corporeal existence is giving him a view into all the things Hannah never told him during their relationship though. Her life before, her life in Australia was always closed to him but now there’s a lot that Hannah must grieve.

The hook for Evie Wyld’s new novel works on multiple levels.

For starters Max isn’t a terribly convincing ghost. Early in the novel he confesses that he probably wouldn’t have believed in himself if he weren’t currently the one doing all the haunting. 

Max’s existential  irony is further compounded when it becomes apparent that this will be something of a mutual haunting. Even as Max tries desperately to harness some kind of spectral energy to reach out to Hannah he will discover aspects of their shared life together that he was unaware of.

The power of stories; told and hidden lies at the heart of The Echoes.

Hannah and Max have built their life together after Hannah fled her old life and her family back in Australia. Kept afloat by a photo of a grandmother she barely knew, taken in front of a house on a London street, Hannah will seek to escape into a life she feels she might have had were it not for the unfortunate circumstance of migration.

Hannah feels her life could have been better had her family never moved to The Echoes. Their story plays out on land that was once a so-called school for Aboriginal children. When Hannah was growing up she learned the euphemisms but now she appreciates they were stolen from their families.

Their stories haunt the land untold even as Hannah’s stories haunt the apartment she shared with Max.

The Echoes is masterfully told over alternating chapters of then and now. 

Max’s impotent haunting skates painfully close to our collective experience of lockdown (much of the novel was written while Wyld was in London lockdown with her partner) and as such Max’s experiences wax and wane between the tragic and the hilarious. 

There is something for all of us in Max’s pent up navel gazing and engrossing study of the local spider. He is at times hapless and at others haughty; a foil to the other men who have occupied Hannah’s life.

The men of the novel are better at causing pain than witnessing it. Much like the ground where Hannah grew up there is more buried than the surface might suggest.

Hannah’s story is one of loss and reconciliation. Where Max is confined to the apartment she is stuck in the life she lived in Australia and how her attempts to escape it prevent her from ever reconciling with herself.

Wyld’s prose allows the reader to occupy this space with Hannah and Max, feeling both their loves and losses. An apartment’s not a large space but Wyld fills it with the lives that fill it and this transports the reader out across time and the world.

The Echoes is a novel about trauma and the ways we deal with or avoid it. As she did in The Bass Rock, Wyld reminds us that we are not alone in time but that we must look to the stories that have come before us to understand our place.

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.

Patrick Holland is a novelist and short story writer. He is the author of seven books, most notably The Mary Smokes Boys (2010), which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Patrick’s new novel is Oblivion.

In a bar that wouldn’t let you in, sit men you can’t afford to drink with. These men make the deals that shape our world. 

One such man is on the make. He’s seeking a fortune that will allow him to escape and is conscious that this is not a game for old men. 

A few more months and he might escape into his own oblivion.

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 from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/