Late Night Live - Separate stories podcast

A chance encounter in 2003 led Heather Morris to meet 87 year-old Auschwitz survivor Lale Sokolov. For the next three years, Lale told her his story. Heather’s book, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, went on to be an international best-seller and television series, and led to two follow-up stories, Cilka’s Journey  and Three Sisters. Now another chance encounter has led Heather to write a remarkable true story, The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse. In 1942 in Nazi-occupied Paris, the Nazis arrest a Jewish family, but their 11-year-old daughter escapes to her piano teacher, Andrée Levallois. Andrée is secretly a French Resistance operative who risks everything, including her own family, to hide the child.  

• Guest: Heather Morris, author, The piano teacher of Montparnasse, published by Firefinch
• Producer: Catherine Zengerer

J.R.R. Tolkien created one of the most intoxicating imaginative worlds of the 20th century, but the man behind Middle-earth remains surprisingly elusive. A deeply religious, conservative Oxford academic, Tolkien was also an obsessive inventor of languages, myths and imaginary histories.

• Guest: DJ Taylor, author of The King under the Mountain
• Producer: Ali Benton

Tree rings are more than a record of a tree’s life. They’re an archive of climate, fire and environmental change. They can take us back thousands of years, revealing droughts, disasters and even clues to the rise and fall of societies. Valerie Trouet examines the science of reading these ancient records, from Europe’s oldest tree to Stradivarius violins.

• Guest: Valerie Trouet, Professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona
• Producer Ali Benton

Bruce Shapiro looks at the political fall-out from the Cornell University rape case, how the failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee has intensified national debate in the US over lethal-injection protocols, and, four weeks out from the mid-terms, all the polls are showing a Democrat win in both the House and the Senate... but how accurate are the polls? And could President Trump's recent $2 Billion USD Medicare spending spree swing the vote?

• Guest: Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor with The Nation magazine and Director of the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma. 
• Producer: Catherine Zengerer

Australian writer Lech Blaine shares the stranger-than-fiction story of his childhood, growing up with a loving foster family in a rural Queensland pub, haunted by fanatical Christian kidnappers. 

Guest:

• Lech Blaine, author, 'Australian Gospel' 

Originally broadcast in November 2024

It's invisible, it drives us crazy, and we can't live without it. The wind has been worshipped, feared and cursed across cultures, referenced in the earliest forms of writing. Simon Winchester tells the stories of how we've mastered the winds, and when we've been humbled by it's awesome force. 

• Guest: Simon Winchester, journalist and author of The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind
• Producer: Alex Tighe

This program was originally broadcast in November 2025.

This author ate multiple breakfasts in each of ten Indian cities, with the aim of looking at India's diversity and layered societies through its breakfast foods, makers and consumers.

• Guest: Priyadarshini Chatterjee, Kolkata-based travel, culture and food writer.
• Author of ‘First Bite: Breakfast stories from urban India’ (Speaking Tiger Books, 2026)
• Producer: Ann Arnold

Confronted with a series of existential threats, like the climate crisis and the potential of AI to end life on earth, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue in their new book that wealthy billionaires, including the so-called "tech bros", have become focused not on how we can deal with those threats,  but who will best survive them. Leaders of tech companies are now warning they could soon lose control as super intelligence supersedes their understanding and is acting for itself. As an increasing number of people both inside and outside of governments believe we are facing the end of days, and are using AI assisted warfare to help bring it on, Klein and Taylor warn there is an urgent need for far more limits on dangerous technologies than US President Donald Trump's Whitehouse accord, which allows companies to regulate themselves. 

• Guest: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors, End times fascism and the fight for the living world, published by Penguin
• Producer: Catherine Zengerer

The German Peasants' War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as thousands of people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The response from feudal overlords was brutal, but while the rebellion was suppressed, it would continue to influence subsequent revolts, contribute to the emergence of peasant and worker movements in the following centuries and serve as a precursor to larger social and political transformations in Europe. 

• Guest: Professor Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, Oxford University and author of Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War, published by Hachette
• Producer: Catherine Zengerer

Trauma has become one of the defining languages of our age. Cultural theorist, Catherine Liu argues that our focus on individual suffering can obscure the deeper forces of class, inequality and power.So has trauma become a new form of political identity, and is it getting in the way of solidarity?

• Guest: Catherine Liu, Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Author of Traumatised: The New Politics of public suffering
• Producer: Ali Benton