Final Draft - Great Conversations

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Helen Fox discussing her new novel How it Feels to Float.

Biz is seventeen and lives near the beach in Wollongong. She’s got her posse at school and her best friend Grace.

She’s also got her dad and they talk, often. The only thing is Biz’s dad died when she was seven, so she can’t exactly tell anyone about these conversations.

Biz’s world is full of the daily struggles of those who are simultaneously trying to assert their identities and find their tribe. After a traumatic encounter, Biz finds herself ostracised by her friends and adrift, suffering in her own private world.

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Elizabeth Bryer discussing her new novel From Here on, Monsters.

Cameron Reybould is an antiquarian bookseller in a city not so different to our own. Her store is a haven, as all bookstores are to readers. Then one morning she arrives to find a stranger asleep on her couch.

The mysterious appearance of Jhon heralds a break in another mystery; the translation of a rare codex Cameron has been commissioned to value.

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode takes us back to the Australian Classics Book Club.

Behrouz Boochani's No Friend But the Mountains was voted by you as our most popular conversation from the first year of the podcast.

No Friend But the Mountains is the stunning debut novel detailing the experience of seeking asylum and imprisonment on Manus Island. Debuting to critical acclaim and receiving numerous awards, No Friend But the Mountains is destined to become a classic of protest writing.

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Alice Bishop.

A Constant Hum is a collection of stories exploring the aftermath of bushfire. Across nearly fifty stories the collection looks at the many ways we try to understand and move forward when catastrophic events occur.

The stories are visceral and sensory, opening up a world that the average reader may never experience but one that is at the heart of sense of community and humanity.

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode takes us back to the Australian Classics Book Club.

Memoirs of Many in One is purported as the collected papers of Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray as edited by her friend Patrick White.

Gray is an ageing actress living out her years with her daughter Hilda in a stately house in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. Trying, as she confesses to a burly taxi driver “...to discover- by writing out - acting out my life - the reason for my presence on earth” and we are invited to follow her recollections as they collapse the past and present of the many lives she has lived.

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Mark Smith

The Winter trilogy takes us into Australia’s not too distant future, a world ravaged by disease and environmental change, where we travel alongside Finn.

As Land of Fences opens Finn is back in Angowrie with Kas and the summer has stretched out for them lulling them back to a sense of peace. The group are troubled by their memories when suddenly the radio springs back to life, transmitting an emergency broadcast.

Could civilization be regrouping? Then the tracking chip in Kas’s arm buzzes, reminding them that civilisation is not a boon for all!

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Alex Landragin discussing his debut novel Crossings.

Crossings presents itself as a collection of three short stories or novellas; The first a short story from the French poet Charles Baudelaire, entitled The Education of a Monster. The second ‘City of Ghosts’ is a dark romance and mystery set in Paris on the eve of German invasion. The final tells the tale of a mysterious being travelling through generations moving from body to body witnessing history unfold.

Delve beneath the surface however and a much stranger story, revealing an enduring love and a horrifying tale of revenge…

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features R.W.R McDonald discussing his debut novel The Nancys.

The Nancy’s is the story of Tippy Chan. Eleven years old, Tippy lives in the small South Otago town of Riverstone. It’s been a shit year for Tippy. Her Dad died nine months ago and her mum is dealing with it by hiding all trace of his existence.

But Tippy’s uncle Pike is coming to stay and together they share a love of Nancy Drew. Tippy has all Pike’s old copies and reads them voraciously wishing she had a mystery to solve. Pike arrives with his new boyfriend Devon and Tippy’s mum leaves for her cruise. And then Tippy’s teacher’s teacher’s horribly mutilated body is discovered by the only traffic lights on the way out of town.

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Sarah Hopkins discussing her new novel The Subjects.

The Subjects opens on a car transporting Daniel to an unknown destination. Daniel is a teenage drug dealer; exclusively prescription and dark web product, who has been diverted from jail at the last minute by a strange intervention.

Dr J runs a facility that Daniel will come to call both a school and a home. There Daniel joins a group of unorthodox teenagers; alike but different to himself, to serve out their punishments in the remote outback setting.