Life Sentences clips

Life Sentences

What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviewsseasoned 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 que…

Social links:

Follow the podcast:

Clips Playlists

Between the Lines
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 edit…
50:15
Paint It Black
In this episode, First Nations guest interviewer Daniel Browning talks to first time author Alec O’Halloran about his biography First Nations artist Mick Tjapaltjari. O’Halloran had never written a book before, but had bought a painting by the artist and become fascinated by his way of expressing …
34:14
The Queen of Brit Bio
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 M…
50:10
The Red in the Bed
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 marri…
49:17
Suburban Bohemia
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 t…
48:28
The Invisible Biographer
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 chan…
35:33
Stranger Than Fiction
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 s…
44:15
Rose de Freycinet
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 …
57:19
MAKING IT UP: Colm Toibin on Thomas Mann
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 …
54:55
COUNTESS ANONYMOUS: Joyce Morgan on Elizabeth Von Arnim
When Mary Beauchamp, a musical young woman from a middle class family in Sydney married a German count, she became Elizabeth von Arnim. Soon disenchanted with marriage and motherhood, she shut herself away at her country estate and began writing bestselling books about her garden and the society ar…
57:32