It's a Long Story

You will know Josh Thomas as the blonde-haired, 20-something from "Please Like Me." An Aussie comedy, which has stolen audience hearts the world over. The New Yorker describes the show as having a "tender, finicky quality, a different charisma." That could well be describing Josh Thomas himself.

Raised in Brisbane, he once described himself as fat and unknowingly gay. There is a lot more to this man Josh Thomas. 

Some words to describe the woman who sits before you; creative - you've seen her on TV and in theatre. Prolific - she's written more than 20 books. Overachieving maybe as well - she wrote many of them while raising two children, and controversial, but we might save that until a little bit later.

Christopher Eric Borrelli is a features and culture writer for the "Chicago Tribune." By his own admission, a bland title. But there's nothing bland about what he writes and how he writes it. I was a typical latchkey kid, he says. But it is still pop culture that shapes him. Today he writes about what for most of us is the mundane, the ordinary. The everyday. With a richness and curiosity that defies the genre.

20 years ago Julie Snyder applied for a job at a little known radio show called, 'This American Life'. They'd only been on the air for a year and she said of her application, "I was incredibly unqualified."

It was there she developed a passion for audio storytelling, and where she met Sarah Koenig. 15 years later the two would start working on a new podcast project in Sarah's basement. The project launched in 2014, it's called 'Serial'. 

Through a unique combination of audio storytelling, music and soundscapes Jad Abumrad has been credited with creating a new aesthetic for broadcast journalism. Colleague, Ira Glass speaks of his podcast 'Radiolab' confessing "I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. I'm a hack in comparison. Everyone else is too." 

Son of a doctor father and scientist mother and raised in Nashville, Jad has said of his childhood that "I was always in the weird in-between space...being the Arab kid in a place where there are no Arabs...and conversely going back to Lebanon and being American." In our season two opener we ask Jad, how did being one of the only Lebanese kids in Tennessee set you onto the intuitive path of breakthrough audio journalism?

Why did being one of the only Lebanese kids in Tennessee set Jad Abumrad onto the path of audio journalism? How did the sound of a toilet flushing almost ruin the pilot episode of Serial? What caused Josh Thomas to black out and rant to half a million people about Grindr? 

Find the answer to these questions and more in season two of the Sydney Opera House podcast It's A Long Story. A podcast that explores the stories behind the big ideas of some of our most influential and acclaimed guests. 

Lionel Shriver is the author of 12 books. Perhaps most famously "We Need To Talk About Kevin", for which he won the Orange Prize. Born Margaret Ann in May 1957, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, as a teenager, she announced to her family that she would change her name to Lionel. A year later, she announced she would no longer be attending church with them. It has been said she writes mostly about characters who are hard to love. A series of what-if scenarios play out on her pages, troubling, confronting, often uncomfortable. "It makes me happy", she has said, "if I'm being successfully frightening." Dividing her time between New York and London, she's fiercely anti-authoritarian, a self-described Libertarian, pro-Brexit, anti-death, and it seems she doesn't have much time for the watercress and wasabi set who now populate our fast gentrifying inner-city suburbs. 

Lev Grossman is the author of five books, perhaps most notably his series beginning with "The Magicians." Described by almost every critic out there perhaps unfairly as "Harry Potter for adults." Born in June of 1969 he was introduced early to the works of C.S. Lewis and went on to spend years as a teenager playing Dungeons and Dragons. He has a day job as the book critic for Time Magazine. But lives a life engrossed in fantasy -- a passion he now shares with a legion of fans. "I bristle whenever fantasy is characterised as escapism," he says, "I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself."

Once described as an obscure Cambridge lecturer after a high-level academic spat on live British radio in truth Priyamvada Gopal is anything but. There are few public intellectuals who think and write on the subjects of India and colonialism with as much influence and insight. A reader with the University of Cambridge in Anglophone and related literature she has a Ph.D. from Cornell and specialises in colonial and post-colonial literature. Priya Gopal has said that "since dictators, war criminals and bankers also read Shakespeare we can't claim that literature will inevitably make society more humane and imaginative. But it does engage most people's ethical capacities." 

Alok Jha is a self-described water obsessive, a scientist and communicator; he's made an art form of unpacking some of the most complex questions of our age. A fascination with water has taken him literally to the ends of the earth. A journey to Antarctica in 2013 came close to an unfortunate end. He joins a long list of remarkable science communicators, who try to make the incomprehensible sound simple. He and his wife recently had their first child, and somewhere in between all of this, he's penned the Water Book.