Award-winning investigative journalist and political biographer Margaret Simons was hesitant about undertaking a biography of Tanya Plibersek until she made a surprising discovery of their shared enthusiasm for Jane Austen.

Here, Simons discusses the differences between authorised and unauthorised biography and which Austen character Plibersek most resembles. She also talks about the impact of Plibersek’s background as the daughter of migrants, her strengths and weaknesses, the character of her ambition, her victories and setbacks, and the one interview she failed to secure.

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In the second part of this conversation John Lahr talks about Arthur Miller’s disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe how it came about and discusses the impact of success and celebrity on Miller,  as well as one of his greatest and most relevant plays,  The Crucible and The Misfits, the film script he wrote for Monroe, as well as his play about her, After the Fall.

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Theatre’s most respected critic, New Yorker critic and biographer John Lahr has compressed his deep understanding of Arthur Miller’s life and creative process into a fascinating biography Arthur Miller: American Witness.

In this revealing portrait, full of personal anecdotes from family and friends, and drawing on an unpublished memoir by a nephew, Lahr explores the connections between Miller’s complex family dynamics, particularly with his father and his brother, to illustrate how personal tensions and themes of betrayal feed into plays like Death of Salesman and All My Sons.

He also talks about Miller’s collaboration and friendship with Elia Kazan and the rift between them following their testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the era of McCarthyism.

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While Shirley Hazzard has many devoted admirers and readers, particularly for her best known novel The Transit of Venus, many would be unaware of her life story. She was a private woman, and because she lived in Europe and America,  Australia had mixed feelings about her - and those mixed feelings were reciprocated.

Now, in a superb new biography, literary scholar Brigitta Olubas provides a comprehensive, insightful portrait of a complex woman who was ashamed of her  genteel Sydney origins and her difficult mother, had a lacklustre career at the United Nations but  was reborn when she reached Italy.

After several unhappy love affairs she found true harmony with the distinguished biographer Francis Steegmuller; Together they moved in intellectual circles and lived a privileged, cultured life  in New York, Naples and on Capri.

Olubas has spent forty years studying Hazzard; the result is arguably the finest Australian biography of the year.

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In this episode, Sophie Cunningham talks about using biography as the thematic spine of her novel This Devastating Fever. The bold, playful narrative interweaves two strands: a modern day one in which Melbourne based biographer Alice is struggling to write a biography of Leonard Woolf, and a historical one, in which we meet Leonard in his life as a civil servant in Ceylon and in his marriage to Virginia Woolf.

Sophie talks about the research process, how she became haunted by Leonard and Virginia, and why the project took fifteen years to complete.

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Bryce Courtenay remains one of the highest selling Australians writers of all times, with sales of more than 20 million of his blockbuster stories of life in Africa and in Australia. Beginning with the Power of One, which became a classic, he took off as a novelist in his fifties after a successful career in advertising. But his beginnings were far from promising and it took all his willpower and drive to overcome poverty, illegitimacy and hard physical labour to achieve his childhood ambition.

His second wife Christine Gee has written a loving, very subjective memoir-biography of the man whom she first came to know professionally as his publicist and researcher. When Bryce started to make romantic overtures to her, she was less than sure about changing the nature of their relationship. But Bryce was not a man who gave up easily.

This is an intimate portrait of a man whose past provided him with tremendous material and a capacity for empathy for anyone who struggled. Thanks to discovering a cache of letters to his mother, Christine Gee has been able to tell the full story of larger-than-life Bryce as never before.

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The family biography is a popular  pastime, but few family biographies get published or are as colourful and bohemian as Sharon Connolly’s account of her vaudevillian relatives, including her great Aunt Gladys who was best known for her prowess as a whistler.  Featuring a roll-call of rogues and eccentrics, My Giddy Aunt goes beyond  biography to become a culture history of the disappearing age of  traveling troupes of entertainers in the era before cinema.

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How has Lachlan Murdoch managed to live comparatively below the radar given his immense power and influence as a  media player? And why  is it so important to him that he identifies strongly as an Australian ?

Journalist biographer  Paddy Manning answers these and many other questions  about the heir to Rupert Murdoch’s dynasty and the threat posed by his siblings in The Successor, a biography whose title winks knowingly at the TV drama Succession.

Providing a balanced portrait based on interviews with more than sixty people close to Lachlan, this is more than a business biography.

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As a society figure in Georgian England, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was more than a hostess, gossip and subject of scandal. A sharp wit, she wrote essays that were radical in their ideas, and way ahead of their time. She was also an early pioneer of inoculation, a technique she observed and experimented with on her own children  as a diplomat’s wife in Turkey. Friend to the good and the great, including Alexander Pope and Voltaire, she was also susceptible to financial scam artists, much like many older women today.

In this episode  TV  drama producer turned biographer Jo Willett, author of

The Pioneering Life of   Mary Wortley Montagu brings Lady Mary to life and explains why she deserves to be as well known as other leading figures of  scientific and feminist history.

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In their heyday, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were the most glamorous and famous couple of stage and screen in Britain, he for his patriotic and patrician roles  as Lord Nelson and Shakespeare’s heroes and villains, she  as the  beautiful actress who won Hollywood’s most coveted role in Gone with the Wind as Scarlett O’Hara.

But the chemistry  between them had a dangerous side, overshadowed by her mental health problems and his ambition.  When they fought, it was bruising for both of them and shocking for their friends and colleagues.

Hollywood writer Stephen Galloway examines this combustible marriage with forensic care, having trawled through letters and  diaries and  quoting many of the couple’s closest friends and associates about the dynamics that made them so charismatic and yet so unhappy.

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