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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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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