The Readings Podcast

In this episode, something a little different, and a little bit special.

Recorded live at the Athenaeum Library in Melbourne, author and literary columnist Jane Sullivan interviewed Mark Rubbo, legendary bookseller, past president of the Australian Booksellers Association, and founding chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Of course, Mark Rubbo is also chairman of Readings, formerly Managing Director.

In this episode, a conversation with Francesca de Tores, author of Saltblood.

The book is a work of historical fiction; it is a wild adventure, a treasure trove, and it weaves an intoxicating tale of gender and survival, passion and loss, journeys and transformation, through the story of Mary Read, a truly remarkable historical figure.

A new instalment of the Readings Kids Podcast.

In this episode, Readings Prize and Readings Foundation coordinator Angela Crocombe – who is also senior buyer for Readings Kids – was joined by members of the Teen Advisory Board for a discussion with author Lili Wilkinson.

Wilkinson is the award-winning author of nineteen books for young people, including The Erasure Initiative and A Hunger of Thorns. She has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and is a passionate advocate for YA and the young people who read it, establishing the Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria. Her latest book is Deep is the Fen.

In today’s episode, a conversation with Rebecca Strating and Joanne Wallis, authors of Girt By Sea: Re-Imagining Australia’s Security.

Australia has drawn closer to many of its Asia-Pacific neighbours in recent years, but 'when push comes to shove, it continues to look well beyond the oceans and regions that surround it to the distant horizons of Europe and North America for its ultimate security guarantee'.

In Girt by Sea, international-relations experts Strating and Wallis instead turn their gazes to Australia's near region, focusing on the six maritime domains central to its national interests: the north seas.

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch of Judith Bishop’s Circadia.

These fiercely empathetic poems range deep into the woods of present, past and future time. With visionary imagination and rapt musicality, this concluding volume in Bishop's award-winning trilogy on time sings in the mind long after reading.

In this episode, a conversation with Stuart Kells, author of the new book, Alice(TM).

This book is the extraordinary story of Alice Corporation, a company created to reimagine financial markets, that brings together an unlikely cast of characters: renowned author Kate Jennings, international banking insider Ian Shepherd, Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, German-born World War II historian Sigrid MacRae, J.P. Morgan deputy chair Roberto Mendoza - and his dog, Stanley.

In this episode, a conversation with Anna Downes, author of the crime novels The Safe Place, The Shadow House, and now, Red River Road.

In this new book, set on the Coral Coast of Western Australia, solo traveller Katy is on a mission to find her free-spirited sister, Phoebe, who disappeared along the same route a year ago. But as she drives her campervan further into the wild north, Katy realises she's not as alone as she'd first believed. Soon she is pulled into a complicated web of secrets, lies, myths and stories that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her sister.

Downes was joined in conversation by Kate Mildenhall, author of the acclaimed novels Skylarking, The Mother Fault, and The Hummingbird Effect.

In this episode, a conversation with Manisha Anjali, a writer, artist, and teacher, and author of 'Naag Mountain'.

This book is a journey across oceans, from the Asian subcontinent to the South Seas, a journey about human trafficking on sugar plantations in Fiji and Australia. Anjali brings to life the histories and events, the stories and myths of a displaced and exploited people, that have been lost in time or forgotten or hidden from view.

Anjali was joined in conversation by Izzy Roberts-Orr, a poet, playwright, broadcaster, arts worker, and a Creative Producer with Red Room Poetry.

In this episode, a conversation with Ouyang Yu, author, translator, academic, and renowned poet.

Ouyang Yu’s first collection of stories in English, The White Cockatoo Flowers, is both assured and tender and at times surprisingly funny. It includes stories set in China and Australia that revel in the truth and candour of lived experience and the joys and constraints of language. In this book Ouyang Yu deftly peels back the layers on what it means to move from one culture to another, and what it means to be a writer, a husband, a parent and a stranger on foreign and familiar ground.

Ouyang Yu was joined in conversation by Alice Pung, a writer and editor whose books include the memoirs Unpolished Gem, Her Father's Daughter, and the novel Laurinda.

In this episode, a conversation with Winnie Dunn – a Tongan-Australian writer, editor, the General Manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, and now author of the novel Dirt Poor Islanders.

Dunn’s book is a potent, mesmerising novel that opens our eyes to the brutal fractures navigated when growing up between two cultures and the importance of understanding all the many pieces of yourself.

Winnie Dunn was joined in conversation at Readings Carlton by Evelyn Araluen, poet and literary editor. Araluen’s first book, Dropbear, won the 2022 Stella Prize.