In this episode, a conversation with poet and author Siân Hughes, whose book Pearl is longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. 

Pearl is a stunning novel, originally published in the United Kingdom by The Indigo Press, and has just been republished in Australia by University of Queensland Press. 

Pearl is a ghost story, a folk story, a story of loss and familial haunting. Hughes’ narrator, Marianne, is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love, and the songs and stories of her childhood. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete.

Siân Hughes in conversation

The Readings Podcast is a celebration of books, reading and culture. Episodes are published weekly and include author interviews, event recordings, booksellers chatting about their favourite reads, industry insights, and more.

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In this episode, a conversation with author Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo, recorded live at the launch of her memoir, My Father’s Shadow. 

Zurbo grew up in thrall to her father, a prominent antiwar activist, brilliant political organiser and covert member of the Communist Party. She adopted his beliefs from an early age, becoming a supporter of the Soviet Union and a peace campaigner. She travelled with him, meeting figures such as Indonesian president Sukarno, and greeted Paul Robeson and North Korean delegates with him at home. But her father could be withholding and difficult. He had a sharp backhand and was not always a faithful husband. 

When Sandra entered adulthood and began to navigate a patriarchal world of work and relationships, she came to question aspects of her father’s worldview. As the communist ideals of the Left were tested and faltered over the Soviet Union, the mood of the times gradually shifted to embrace the counterculture. Sandra, living and working amid the swirl of Melbourne’s arts and political scenes, absorbed ideas about women, family and Jewish culture that often led to tense conversations with her father. 

My Father’s Shadow is a portrait of life on the Left during a time of great social change. Lyrical, sharply observed and affecting, it is a candid exploration of the fraught dynamics between father and daughter – and, ultimately, the love that underlies them.

Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo in conversation

An instalment of The Comics Question, a series where Bernard Caleo and I discuss comics, graphic novels, and all manner of illustrated books, zines, and other associated productions. 

In this episode, Bernard Caleo was joined by Readings bookseller Nick Curnow to give a round-up of some of the most intriguing, beautiful, and thought-provoking comics and graphic novels from 2023. This is part two of two, so do check out the first instalment of this particular conversation.

The Comics Question: Notable Books of 2023 Part Two

In this episode, a conversation with journalist and author Marina Kamenev, author of Kin: Family in the 21st Century. 

While the nuclear family still exists, many more types of kinship surround us. Kin is an investigation into what influences us to have children and the new ways that have made parenthood possible. It delves into the experiences of couples without children, single parents by choice and rainbow families, and investigates the impacts of adoption, sperm donation, IVF and surrogacy, and the potential for a future of designer babies. Assisted reproductive technology has developed quickly, and the ways in which we think and speak about its implications — both legally and ethically — need to catch up. 

This book is an incisive and powerful look at how families are created today, and how they might be created in the future.

Marina Kamenev in conversation

In this episode, a conversation with Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital. This is life on our planet as you’ve never seen it before: in this spellbinding and uplifting novel six astronauts rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity? 

Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents, and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. 

Samantha Harvey’s previous books include The Wilderness, All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. Her work has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women's Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award.

Samantha Harvey in conversation

In this episode, a conversation with Mykaela Saunders, author of a new collection of short stories, ‘Always Will Be’. 

Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher and researcher, and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award-winning anthology of First Nations speculative fiction.  

Saunders has been awarded numerous prizes for their writing, including the 2022 David Unaipon Award, and this most recent work draws from stories written from the past couple of years into a collection that poses the question: what might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed Valley if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty?

Siân Hughes in conversation

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