In this moving conversation Chloe Hooper and Tim Baker chat with Nikki Gemmell about the things we can draw on to live everyday life with awe, and how our mortality brings the fullness of life into sharp relief. Together they highlight the importance of conversations around mortality, and how to approach the subject as a community, to inspire robust discussion about how to live life to the fullest.

This podcast is proudly supported by First National Byron

Listen Now

In this lively conversation, authors Sarah Armstrong, Bronwyn Brancroft and Isobelle Carmody sit down with Tristan Bancks to discuss children’s books, and what they can offer readers of all ages. Each speaker explores what draws them to read and write children’s books, and the ingredients required to create quality children’s literature, including the balance between lighter themes, such as hope, wonder and celebration, with the dark elements of storytelling.

Listen Now

Three novelists Emily Brugman, Ashley Hay and Christos Tsiolkas discuss their work and the synchronous exchange that occurs between writing and the natural world. Together they examine the fine line between inspiration and exaggeration, the role of intuition, the importance of space and silence and the care that must be taken when describing sensory experiences. Coupled with evocative readings from each of their novels, this conversation is a delightful journey into the inner workings of three very different, yet equally outstanding writers.

Listen Now

In this explorative conversation, authors Jessie Cole and Nikki Gemmell sit down with Zacharey Jane for an intimate and at times brutally honest chat about female desire in all its guises – from the purely physical to the more nuanced, deeper yearnings for personal growth, connection and fulfilment. Both Jessie and Nikki share how their writing practices have served to process lived experience and interrogate the impact of trauma, ultimately giving voice to the niggles of self-doubt that so-often pervade the female psyche.

Listen Now

In this uplifting conversation Matthew Evans and Costa Georgiadis chat with Indira Naidoo about the joy and experience of gardening. They discuss the intimate connection of working with soil, and gardening as the ultimate act of optimism. With practical advice to connect with nature from many different entry points, this chat will leave you inspired and motivated to get your hands dirty and reap the many benefits for individuals and the planet.

Listen Now

Let us take you on a wild rollercoaster ride of love and other stories! Trent Dalton, Nigel Featherstone and Hannah Kent – three incredible novelists in their own right – come together for this wonderful panel about the forever beguiling subject of love.

We hear tales of heartbreak and jubilation, we shed tears of sorrow and laughter, we go on a journey so doggedly awkward that we cheer victoriously when love is finally, triumphantly found.

Let your heart sing and enjoy this stand-out session from the 2022 Byron Writers Festival.

Listen Now

This conversation from the 2022 Byron Writers Festival takes a deep dive into stillness in the modern age. We hear from Paul Callaghan about what we can learn from Indigenous wisdom and ways of being, Indira Naidoo discusses how our relationship with the natural world can bring stillness and Christine Jackman provides us with ways of turning down the noise (and turning off our screens).

Ultimately this is a conversation about how we can change the way we live; to learn from those that have come before us to find ways to achieve tranquillity in the fast-paced future that awaits us.

Listen Now

Sarah Armstrong interviews Kathryn Heyman about her memoir Fury. They unpack questions around the writing process: What stories do we choose to tell and why? When is the right time to write about personal or traumatic events? Kathryn also talks about her early writing life, the books that inspired her, gender politics and the reverberations of the #metoo movement.

About Fury
At the age of twenty, after a traumatic sexual assault trial, Kathryn Heyman ran away from her life and became a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea.

After one wild season on board the Ocean Thief, the only girl among tough working men, facing storms, treachery and harder physical labour than she had ever known, Heyman was transformed.

A roadmap of recovery and transformation, this is the story of becoming heroic in a culture which doesn’t see heroism in the shape of a girl.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Purchase the Book

Fury is available to purchase online via The Book Room Collective.

Listen Now

Produced in collaboration with Griffith Review, Sarah Sentilles talks with Ashley Hay about her latest works. They discuss her essay, ‘Creation Stories’, from Griffith Review 73: Hey, Utopia! as well as Sarah’s new memoir Stranger Care.

In this insightful discussion, Ashley and Sarah discuss many topics, including the collision between bureaucracy and love, the nature of creativity and the ability of art to change the way we see the world.

Stranger Care is the moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn — about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin. Stranger Care is available to purchase online via The Book Room Collective.

‘Creation Stories’ is an essay about the world-making power of art. Published in Griffith Review 73: Hey Utopia!, available to purchase online here.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Listen Now

Nicole Abadee talks with Kavita Bedford about her book Friends and Dark Shapes. They discuss the contours of contemporary life in the city, from insecure employment and housing, to second-generation identity, waves of migration, online dating and social alienation.

About the book

A group of friends moves into a share house in Redfern. They are all on the cusp of thirty and big life changes. Friends & Dark Shapes is a novel of love and loss, of constancy and change. Most of all, it is about looking for connection in an estranged world.

Friends & Dark Shapes is available to purchase online via The Book Room Collective.

Listen Now

In this Byron Writers Festival X BooksBooksBooks podcast collaboration, Pip Williams talks with Nicole Abadee about her novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words. They discuss the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, and how the exclusion of particular words inspired Williams’ sweeping story of Esme as she sets about collecting the discarded vernacular of the English lexicon.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape our experience of the world.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Purchase the Book

The Dictionary of Lost Words is available to purchase online via The Book Room Collective.

Listen Now

Chris Raja talks with Sunil Badami about his insightful and moving memoir, Into The Suburbs. They discuss the roles of truth and fiction in memoir, as well as family, migration, homelands and identity.

Exploring topical issues of race, class and migration, Into the Suburbs is an affecting portrait of one family’s search for home.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Purchase the Book

Into the Suburbs is available to purchase online via The Book Room Collective.

Listen Now

Fiona Murphy kept her deafness a secret for over twenty-five years. After an accident to her hand, she discovered that sign language could change her life, and that Deaf culture could be part of her identity. In this podcast she talks with Caroline Baum about her memoir The Shape of Sound, and her journey from a position of shame to one of pride as she navigated the world of d/Deafness and disability.

Blending memoir with observations on the healthcare industry, The Shape of Sound is a story about the corrosive power of secrets, stigma and shame, and how deaf experiences and disability are shaped by economics, social policy, medicine and societal expectations.

Transcript available here.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Purchase the Book

The Shape of Sound is available to purchase online via The Book Room Collective.

Listen Now

Tristan Bancks, longtime Byron Writers Festival supporter and Room to Read ambassador, chairs a discussion with Sisonke Msimang, Jennie Orchard and Alice Pung about their contributions to the anthology The Gifts of Reading, including the books they all love to give.

The Gifts of Reading is an anthology of essays about the joys of reading and of giving books, from some of the world’s most beloved writers, inspired by Robert Macfarlane, curated by Jennie Orchard, and published on the 20th anniversary of the global literacy non-profit Room to Read.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Purchase the Book

The Gifts of Reading is available to purchase online via The Book Room Collective.

Listen Now

Sophie Hardcastle talks with Emily Brugman about their novel Below Deck. They discuss writing techniques and processes, as well as the characters and themes of the book, including sexual violence, trauma, nature and renewal.

Below Deck is a heartbreakingly poetic and haunting story about the vagaries of consent, about who has the space to speak and who is believed.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Purchase the Book

Below Deck is available to purchase online via The Book Room Collective.

Listen Now

Described as a spiky, sharp, intriguingly dark and tender book, full of pathos, fury and wit, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss has received wide critical acclaim. In this podcast, Sarah Kanowski from Radio National’s Conversations talks with Meg about her unforgettable characters, the interplay between humour and suffering, and about her gentle rendering of mental illness.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Listen Now

Join celebrated Australian storyteller Jock Serong and acclaimed writer Mirandi Riwoe for a lively discussion about Jock’s new novel The Burning Island, recorded live at Lennox Head Cultural Centre, in collaboration with Lennox Arts Board (LAB).

Irresistible prose, unforgettable characters and magnificent, epic storytelling: The Burning Island delivers everything readers have come to expect from Jock Serong. It may be his most moving, compelling novel yet.

Listen Now

Yuwaalaraay writer and founding member of Indigenous folk duo Stiff Gins, Nardi Simpson talks with Bundjalung writer, editor and Byron Writers Festival board member Grace Lucas-Pennington about her debut novel Song of the Crocodile.

Full of music, Yuwaalaraay language and exquisite description, Song of the Crocodile is a lament to choice and change, and the unyielding land that sustains us all, if only we could listen to it. This debut novel is a captivating Australian saga from the winner of the 2018 black&write! fellowship.

At the close of the conversation Nardi performs her original track ‘Song of the Crocodile’ on ukulele.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Listen Now

In this conversation, recorded live as part of Byron Writers Festival’s out-of-season program, author and academic Jenny Hocking joins celebrated journalist Kerry O’Brien to discuss her revealing new book The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. In this ground breaking account, Hocking discloses the obstruction, intrigue and duplicity she faced during her 10-year campaign to expose the truth behind the dismissal.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Listen Now

In this Conversations from Byron podcast, Jock Serong speaks with Chris Hanley about his new book The Burning Island. They discuss creating in the time of Covid-19, while Jock walks us through some of his researching and writing habits. Delving into the book itself, Jock explains where the idea for the story originated and its relationship to his previous novel Preservation. They go on to discuss some of the numerous themes present in the novel, from seafaring to parent-child relationships and problems of addiction.

About the book

Eliza Grayling, born in Sydney when the colony itself was still an infant, has lived there all her thirty-two years. Too tall, too stern—too old, now—for marriage, she looks out for her reclusive father, Joshua, and wonders about his past. There is a shadow there: an old enmity.

When Joshua Grayling is offered the chance for a reckoning with his nemesis, Eliza is horrified. It involves a sea voyage with an uncertain, probably violent, outcome. Insanity for an elderly blind man, let alone a drunkard.

Unable to dissuade her father from his mad fixation, Eliza begins to understand she may be forced to go with him. Then she sees the vessel they will be sailing on. And in that instant, the voyage of the Moonbird becomes Eliza’s mission too.

Irresistible prose, unforgettable characters and magnificent, epic storytelling: The Burning Island delivers everything readers have come to expect from Jock Serong. It may be his most moving, compelling novel yet.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Listen Now