Life Sentences
Life Sentences
What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviews seasoned players and persistent newcomers who share their experience of navigating sensitive territory in the search for the real story behind a person’s life. Whether they are writing about the famous or the forgotten, whether their version of events is authorised or unauthorised, biography is a high-stakes qu…Social links:
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
In 2024 a story appeared in the Toronto Star by Deborah Dundas that set the world of biography on fire. At the centre of it was Alice Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker, who has devoted thirty years of his life as an academic to a close archival study of Alice Munro’s work. It was revealed that …
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The Fictional Biographer
Dominic Amerena is a rising young Australian writer who has chosen a biographer as the central figure in his novel I Want Everything. His ambitious, unnamed narrator recognises an older woman at the city baths one day as Brenda Shales, a writer who was famous for two incendiary novels before disap…
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Best Biographies
In a first for Life Sentences, host Caroline Baum welcomes a panel of four Australian biographers to discuss the biographies they have read and enjoyed recently. -Ryan Butta chooses Anthony Sharwood’s hybrid travelogue biography of Polish freedom fighter Tadeusz Kosciusko and also mentions Didion …
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Pillow Talk Part 2
Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages that boosted her thirst for power. But Sonia Purnell argues persuasively that Harriman was in fact one of the most significant diplomats of the 20th century a…
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Pillow Talk Part 1
Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages that boosted her thirst for power. But Sonia Purnell argues persuasively that Harriman was in fact one of the most significant diplomats of the 20th century a…
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The Good Wife
Race Matthews had a distinguished career as a federal politician and Victorian state Minister, but the highlight of his career was his time as Gough Whitlam’s Principal Private Secretary. A joiner from a very early age, he understood the power of working within an organisation to bring about c…
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Love Is Blind
Painter Charles Blackman described himself as a guttersnipe when he met and fell in love with partially sighted poet Barbara Patterson. Together, the couple became part of a bohemian crowd of artists who moved between Sydney and Melbourne, and helped shape Australian art for decades. Now th…
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Literary Legends
Recorded live as part of Sydney Writers Festival 2024, this is a three way conversation between three biographers - Nadia Wheatley, Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham - about three literary legends: Charmian Clift, Shirley Hazzard, Elizabeth Harrower - three writers who experienced the twentieth cen…
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Pole Position
Anthony Sharwood set out to investigate how Australia’s highest peak comes to be named after an eighteenth century freedom fighter and military engineer, Taddeusz Koszciuscko. The result is an unorthodox hybrid he describes as a travelography. The result is much more than a portrait of a remarkabl…
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Bitter Lemons
The official history of Australia may have forgotten colourful rogues like Tom Ley, but Mudgee painter Michael Bourke has painted a biographical suite of scenes that tell his life story in almost cartoonish images. He talks to Caroline Baum about how Tom Ley became known as Lemonade Ley and how he …
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