Recorded live as part of Sydney Writers Festival 2024, this is a three way conversation between three biographers - Nadia Wheatley, Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham - about three literary legends: Charmian Clift, Shirley Hazzard, Elizabeth Harrower - three writers who experienced the twentieth century very differently but who overlapped in shared perspectives on their home country, Australia, and its ability to fulfil its potential.

While both Hazzard and Clift spent large parts of their lives overseas, Harrower mostly stayed home, sharing an extensive correspondence with Hazzard. Clift, meanwhile, shared her thoughts on issues both frivolous and serious with her devoted readers in a regular weekly newspaper column, as well as in her books.

While Hazzard achieved literary glory internationally, Clift and Harrower found success, to varying degrees, at home. All three are in print today.

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Anthony Sharwood set out to investigate how Australia’s highest peak comes to be named after an eighteenth century freedom fighter and military engineer, Taddeusz Koszciuscko.

The result is an unorthodox hybrid he describes as a travelography. The result is much more than a portrait of a remarkable figure of enlightenment and progressive ideals, whose influence was felt from his native Poland to America, where his will was a vexed issue for his friend Thomas Jefferson.

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The official history of Australia may have forgotten colourful rogues like Tom Ley, but Mudgee painter Michael Bourke has painted a biographical suite of scenes that tell his life story in almost cartoonish images. He talks to Caroline Baum about how Tom Ley became known as Lemonade Ley and how he rose from abject poverty to become a Minister in the NSW government, before travelling to London and being accused of murder. It sounds like fiction, but it’s all true.

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Caroline Hodgson took the name Madame Brussels to become the ‘flash madam’ of Melbourne in the post Gold Rush era. Her business sense for buying real estate and flair for style and comfort attracted the big end of town, as well as the attention of the press. As well as running a brothel, she was a wife and a mother, a fascinating character who showed care and consideration for her employees. Her biographer Barbara Minchinton uncovers her story through a mix of archaeology, a photo album and the sleuthing skills of a feminist historian.

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When Caroline Baum interviewed Fleet Street veteran royal correspondent Robert Jobson about his new, very favourable biography of Katherine, Princess of Wales, the conversation did not go as planned.

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For decades, Kitty Kelley has held the reputation as the queen of celebrity biography in the US, writing juicy and revealing accounts of the lives of Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, The Bush family, Nancy Reagan etc.

Now in her eighties, she reflects on how she got started as a journalist in Washington DC, and reveals some of the tricks and techniques that she used to get reliable sources to talk to her while avoiding prosecution from her powerful subjects. In this candid and revealing conversation she talks about the rewards and downsides of a unique career as the world’s bestselling biographer.

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Donald Horne was Australia’s leading public intellectual in the sixties and seventies and coined the phrase The Lucky Country in his bestselling book of the same title. The phrase has entered the Australian vernacular, and is often misused and interpreted as a sign of national complacency.

Before he became an author, Horne had tried on many hats: as a journalist, ad man, and editor; later he became an academic and a bureaucrat. The big story in his life was his political shift from the conservative right to the progressive left, thanks to his enthusiasm for Gough Whitlam’s vision of Australia’s potential.

Famous for his love of a long lunch (especially when he was the editor of the Bulletin), he was indeed lucky to find in his second wife Myfanwy a partner who was a true collaborator in all his ideas.

Ryan Cropp’s energetic debut biography captures the paradoxes and many-faceted ambitions of the man and his times.

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There has never been anyone like Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev.

The Russian impresario shook up the dusty world of ballet, making it the centre of the avant garde in the early part of the twentieth century, especially in Paris where the premieres of L’Apres Midi ‘D’un Faune and the Rite of Spring caused shock and scandal.

Born in a provincial backwater, Diaghilev made his way to St Petersburg with ambitions as a painter and composer, but failed at both. Eventually he discovered that his talents were more curatorial and, after bringing Russian art to Paris, he returned with The Ballets Russes, a troupe of brilliant dancers, including Nijinski, and gorgeous sets and costumes, taking the city by storm.

Collaborating with artists like Picasso and Stravinsky, Diaghilev changed the face of dance forever. He defined the word impresario in a unique way, discovering talent, finding the money to stage lavish productions and generating huge audience excitement, in a dizzying feat of risk-taking and flair.

In this episode, British cultural critic Rupert Christensen discusses his book Diaghilev’s Empire, about the impact, influence and legacy of a larger than life individual who loved Russia but was condemned by history to a life in exile.

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Recorded in the lead up the UK election of 2024, this is a conversation with Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer’s biographer, journalist and former Labour insider Tom Baldwin. He explains how the biography was written with Starmer’s co-operation but was not authorised by him and how Starmer learns things from the book that he did not expect, but feels uncomfortable with some of the details about his complex family relationships.

What emerges is a portrait of a relentless, hardworking details man, who consults, listens and is outcome focussed. A man who is not political in the traditional sense, but who has leadership skills and who values of integrity and decency but is not always good at playing the media game. He’d much rather play football with his old mates.

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Most people are unaware of the existence of the Australian Dictionary of National Biography, a remarkable effort of scholarship by an army of volunteer historians and specialist contributors committed to documenting significant and representative Australians. It’s a challenging task in terms not only of scale but because previous entries need to be revised in the light of fresh historical evidence and interpretation. Women and First Nations figures were overlooked when the project began, but that is now being addressed.

The Director of the National Dictionary of Biography is historian Dr Melanie Nolan. She tells Life Sentences how the Dictionary differs from its British counterpart, how entries are selected and how the Dictionary is trying to move with the times.

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