In between the two world wars, a group of lesbian expatriate women from the US and UK found freedom in Paris to explore and foster creativity. They dressed differently and lived and loved with abandon. Some are well known to us today, like Gertrude Stein, some have been forgotten, among them Sylvia Beach, who took a risk and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would touch it.

In this conversation biographer Diana Souhami revisits these free spirits who sought creative fulfillment and sexual liberation through a bold new movement of artistic experimentation that would come to be known as Modernism and would include giants of the twentieth century.

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Award winning author Kate Grenville has an ambivalent attitude to biography.  She leverages  this by using its materials, particularly letters, to create an alternative version of events in her novel A Room Made of Leaves, about the colonial figure of Elizabeth Macarthur.

But when she came to editing the original letters for a recently published collection, what else did she discover about Elizabeth and the  ambiguities of correspondence in the eighteenth century, when news took so long to reach the other side of the world?  And when what was left unsaid was sometimes as eloquent as the writing on the page?

Kate’s  thought-provoking conversation  with Caroline Baum sheds light on one of the most fruitful but challenging aspects of biographical research.

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In this episode, First Nations guest interviewer Daniel Browning talks to first time author Alec O’Halloran  about  The Master from Marnpi, his biography First Nations artist Mick  Namarari Tjapaltjarri.
O’Halloran had never written a biography  before, but had bought a painting by the artist and become fascinated by  his way of expressing his place and his culture. 
Over several years and many visits to  the Western Desert, Alice Springs and Kintore,  he earned the trust of his subject’s widow and community enough to capture a sense of Tjapaltjarri’s life as a hunter, a stockman , artists and family man. 
His lavishly illustrated, self-published biography tells the story of how Tjapaltjarri became a leading figure in the  Papunya Tula art movement, one of the most significant in Indigenous art.  In seeing the project through, O’Halloran kept  an important promise.

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Few biographers can equal Claire Tomalin’s reputation as the queen of British biography. After her beginnings in journalism, she’s had a long and glittering  career writing about the illustrious lives of Dickens and Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry James, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Katherine Mansfield - an amazing roll call.

Modest and self-effacing herself,  Tomalin  has also shed life on women who have been forgotten  by history or overshadowed - like the actress Nelly Tiernan, who was Dickens’ lover, and another actress,Mrs Jordan, a royal mistress of William the Fourth who bore him ten illegitimate children.

As well as being dauntingly prolific, she manages to be both scholarly and popular. Since this interview, Tomalin has published her tenth  biography,  of the young HG Wells, announcing that it would be her last book, which is fair enough when you are 88.

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Katharine Susannah Pritchard (1883 -1969) enjoyed early success as a writer, travelled internationally and married a war hero. Despite seeming privilege, her life was anything but smooth.

In this episode, Caroline Baum talks to her biographer Nathan Hobby about uncovering the identity of her married lover, and how she became a passionate and uncritical follower of Soviet Communist ideology while writing novels that were well ahead of their time. What emerges is the portrait of an unconventional woman who  spoke and wrote her mind, often at great personal cost.

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When Charmian Clift returned to Australia with her husband George Johnston and their children, they left behind a creative Greek idyll and returned to suburban Sydney at a time of social upheaval.

Charmian threw herself into her weekly column on the women’s pages of a major newspaper and used it to question whether the country had changed as much as people claimed it had during their absence.  Seeing herself as both a migrant and returning expat gave her a unique outsider perspective. She soon developed a huge following for her opinions on everything from the war in Vietnam to the wearing of hats.

Her biographer Nadia Wheatley talks to Caroline Baum about how Charmian adjusted to suburbia and how she used her own lived experience and distinctive personal voice to connect with her readers.

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Caroline Baum talks to the doyenne of Australian biography Brenda Niall on the publication of her memoir, An Accidental Career, about her evolution as a biographer, which coincided with fresh interest in figures in Australian cultural history.

Niall reflects on how the status of biography has changed, how she came to write about figures like the Boyd dynasty and the recurring themes of home and displacement as central to her understanding of her subjects, whether writing about painter Judy Cassab or the daunting figure of Archibishop Mannix.

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One of the most perplexing figures in modern Australian literary biography, Eve Langley used her experiences as a teenager with her sister in rural Victoria as the basis for her bestselling novel The Pea Pickers.

But many other aspects of her life remain a mystery to this day.

Why did she spend seven years in a mental institution? Why did she change her name to Oscar Wilde? Why did she lose contact with her husband and three children? Why were she and her sister, to whom she was once so close, estranged at the end of her life?

In her biography Helen Vines attempts to find answers to these and other mysteries that surround Langley.

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In one of the most remarkable seafaring stories of stowaway adventure, Suzanne Falkiner tells the story of Rose de Freycinet, who could not bear to be parted from her husband and so, wearing men’s clothes, snuck on to his ship  in 1817 to join his scientific expedition to the South Seas.

In doing so, not only was Rose doing something highly illegal, but she  also became the first woman to circumnavigate the world and leave a record of that perilous journey. In letters and her journal , she recorded remarkable scenes and encounters in places including Mauritius, Brazil and the early Sydney settlement before being shipwrecked on the Falkland Islands.

Rose has long deserved a biography that acknowledges her courage and capacity  for resilience, curiosity and French savoir-faire.

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Multi-award winning novelist Colm Toibin tackles his second biographical novel in The Magician, about the German novelist Thomas Mann and his eccentric family.

After writing The Master, his first biographical novel about Henry James, Toibin turns to another writer with a secret inner life as a homosexual who, like James, also lived in exile from his homeland.

The Magician takes us from the strict and formal high bourgeois home of young Thomas Mann in Lubeck to France, Switzerland and America, where Mann observes the Nazi regime from a safe distance.  Meanwhile his flamboyant children pursue their own adventures in a series of much more open and casual sexual encounters - while his all-seeing wife Katia keeps the family together.

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