Biographers in Conversation

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Ramie Targoff chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Ramie Targoff selected four female contemporaries of Shakespeare who were publicly recognised writers to challenge Virginia Woolf’s claim that ‘Judith Shakespeare could not exist’. Why Ramie opened with Virginia Woolf and Judith Shakespeare to confront the powerful but mistaken narrative that there were no female authors in Shakespeare’s England. Ramie chose female authors who crafted psalms, poetry, tragedy and diaries to showcase the breadth of Renaissance women’s writing. Ramie initially planned four separate mini biographies but shifted to an intertwined collective biography when she realised the women’s lives and networks overlapped.​ How Ramie braided the women’s stories to craft a biography that reads like a novel but avoids veering into fiction. Why Ramie treated letters, diaries and memoirs as the richest sources, privileging the women’s own voices wherever they survived. How Ramie retraced the women’s footsteps by visiting homes, castles, churches and landscapes to evoke their lived environments. How Ramie marked speculative moments for readers, explaining what is known, what is guessed, and how gaps in the record shaped her interpretations.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Robert Dessaix chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Chameleon: A Memoir of Art, Travel, Ideas and Love. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Chameleon was shortlisted for the 2026 National Biography Award, with judges calling it ‘vintage Dessaix’ and praising its ‘dazzling display of erudition’. Chameleon takes its title from the idea that a chameleon changes colour on the surface while staying essentially the same underneath, mirroring how Dessaix ‘blended’ into each era's doctrines while something stubbornly himself remained. At 80, Dessaix describes his head as an ants' nest, alive with tiny scurrying thoughts, and calls memoir the perfect genre for playing in the gap between what everyone has taken you to be and who you in reality are. He addresses his naive younger self by his adoptive name, Thomas Robert Jones, and argues by text with his acerbic friend Niall, who may be his alter ego. Dessaix admits he rearranges the actual sequence of events, placing India before hospital rather than after, because truth for him sits elsewhere than strict chronology, and seducing the reader with a work of art matters more than accuracy. He aimed for a voice that ‘rattles on’ like a companion on a walk rather than a lecture, echoing the Byron epigraph he quotes from Don Juan. Rather than a tidy resolution, he closes the book with a chapter called The Green Room, insisting that art and a life are never truly finished.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, S. Shakthidharan (Shakthi) chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath centres on the family home Shakthi’s grandmother dismantled piece by piece in Sri Lanka and rebuilt in Western Sydney as an act of willpower amid civil war. Shakthi personifies his family’s home as a living presence capable of being both suffocating and liberating, reflecting the complexity of migrant obligation and belonging. Shakthi began writing Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath after realising, during the hardest period of his life juggling young children and a dying father, that he was experiencing genuine belonging inside a family for the first time at age 40. The title Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath comes from Shakthi’s Hindu wedding ceremony, when facing his gathered community instead of his bride revealed a profound truth about love and connection. Each chapter is addressed directly to a key figure in Shakthi’s life, including his mother, partner, father and sons. This creates an intimate space between the first and second person. Shakthi shared early drafts of the manuscript with his mother, partner and uncle, incorporating their responses into what ultimately appeared in their respective chapters. The memoir closes with Shakthi’s two sons playing on the same porch his great-grandfather once sat on in Sri Lanka. The children were steering an imaginary ship, a symbol of hope and continuity passed to the next generation.

In this special episode of Biographers in Conversation for the National Biography Award, Dr Micaela Sahhar chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting the award-winning Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Micaela Sahhar won the 2026 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work for Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. The award judges remarked: ‘Micaela Sahhar’s distinctive voice moves effortlessly between the intimate, the comic, the academic and the poetic, transforming a family archive into a profound meditation on history, belonging and loss.’ ‘Here, history is not a fixed record but a living inheritance, continually reclaimed and reinterpreted’, the judges added. ‘Expansive in vision, innovative in form, and profound in its contribution to contemporary life writing, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a work of rare achievement.’ With many primary sources destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, Micaela learned to read absence as a form of evidence, drawing on object memory, fragments, photographs, and ephemeral archives to reconstruct what official records could not. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is structured as a 48-entry encyclopaedia spanning four generations of Michael’s Palestinian family, from the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Palestinian community of Melbourne.

In this special episode of Biographers in Conversation for the 2026 National Biography Award, Dr Helen Ennis chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Max Dupain: A Portrait . Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Helen Ennis received the prestigious 2026 National Biography Award for Max Dupain: A Portrait , the biography of Max Dupain, the most influential photographer of the 20th century. The award judges remarked: ‘Max Dupain: A Portrait was chosen for this year’s National Biography Award as an exceptional example of the biographer’s craft. Elegantly structured and written, it weaves Dupain’s life and work into a complex whole.’ ‘Interspersed microchapters accompanying carefully curated images illuminate not only the range and originality of his photography but also aspects of his character’, the judges added. ‘As biographer, Helen Ennis is present but never obtrusive, questioning and interpreting while remaining non-judgmental.’ ‘This biography of a major 20th-century Australian photographer will be read long into the 21st.’

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sophia Lambton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Why the narrative opened with a prologue about Maria Callas’s artistry. How exhaustive research revealed Callas’s brilliance and flaws. How a detailed calendar of events, letters and performances tracked Callas’s evolving thoughts. How Sophia built comprehensive files by transcribing and translating all of Callas’s interviews. Why chapter headings include Callas’s own words. How Sophia dismantled Callas’s ‘diva stereotype’ and portrayed her human story.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Erin Vincent chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Fourteen Ways of Looking. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: In Fourteen Ways of Looking, Erin Vincent revisits the tragic year when both her parents were killed in a motor vehicle accident. She was 14. Erin began noticing the number 14 recurring in books, films and news, prompting her to record these instances until they formed a 2,000-word essay and eventually a full manuscript. The narrative is fragmented rather than linear. Every fragment contains a reference to the number 14, drawn from history, literature, or memory, and each is deliberately paired with the fragment before and after it to create subtle, sometimes cryptic connections. Erin describes the compositional process as a ‘crazy jigsaw puzzle’, holding hundreds of shards of memory and fact in her head, aided only by notebooks and a highlighter pen. Erin discusses the active, layered function of white space on the page, which she uses to represent silences, omissions and the unspeakable, letting absence do the emotional work instead of over-explaining feeling. Erin reflects on ending the book with her mother’s voice from an old cassette recording Erin offers advice to aspiring fragment-writers: experiment freely, read widely in the form and use constraints as a source of creative freedom.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Martin Thomas chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Clever Men: How Worlds Collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Martin Thomas’s research began in the ABC’s sound archive, where he stumbled upon recordings made during the 1948 American Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, an expedition he had never heard of. Martin chose the group biography form to capture the expedition’s internal tensions. Frank Setzler led the collection of human remains from Indigenous mortuary sites, shipping them to the Smithsonian. Martin describes this as a kind of kidnapping: displaced spirits in a foreign land. Martin made repeated research trips to Arnhem Land, showing digitised expedition films and recordings to community elders. Old men wept with joy at seeing ancestors and ceremonies on film. Clever Men ends in the early 21st century with the repatriation of the human remains, led by the late elder Jacob Nayinggull, a man Martin describes as one of the true clever men of the story, and one of his most important mentors. The title’s double meaning Clever Men is an Aboriginal English term for a shaman or spiritual healer. Martin explains how the title emerged from an incident in which local Arnhem Land people watched a mammalogist shoot, skin and stuff animals, concluding this westerner must be a powerful clever man from another world. The irony is intentional. Biography assumes a Western sense of self: names, birth dates, individual identity. In Bininj and Yolŋu culture, the dead aren’t named during mourning, numerical dates aren’t used, and the self is understood through a spirit that belongs to country and returns to it.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Judith Mackrell, one of Britain’s most eminent biographers, chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Artists, Siblings, Visionaries is the first major dual biography of Gwen and Augustus John, siblings who became two of the most significant British artists of the 20th century. The death of Augusta, Gwen and Augustus’s mother, left the young children emotionally bereft, creating in Augustus a compulsive pattern of falling in love with new women, and in Gwen an intense, sometimes obsessive yearning directed at unattainable figures such as the French sculptor, François Auguste René Rodin. Judith challenges the assumption that Augustus’s fame damaged Gwen’s career. Instead, he was his sister’s most devoted advocate and correctly prophesied that history would one day remember him as Gwen’s brother. By choosing a dual biography, Judith could use both siblings as a ‘marvellous laboratory’, tracking year by year the social, cultural and economic forces that propelled Augustus to fame rapidly while Gwen remained largely unseen, illuminating the structural barriers facing women artists. Judith came to understand Gwen’s famous reclusive shyness as a form of armour, a deliberate self-presentation that gave her control over who she engaged with, contradicted by her ferocious capacity for emotional pursuit and sustained creative work. Judith describes herself as a ‘gardener’ rather than an ‘architect’ of narrative. She begins drafting the manuscript almost from the start of the research, finding that structure emerges organically, with serendipitous connections between the two lives surprising her along the way. For Judith, writing about artists means foregrounding the people, not just the work, asking how two desolate children became artists, and what the interaction was between their art and their lives.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Sylvia Martin chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Double Act: Eirene Mort and Nora Kate Weston. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: While Eirene Mort was a designer, black & white illustrator, watercolourist, etcher, tapestry worker and potter, Nora Kate Weston, whom Eirene named ‘Chips’, was a carpenter, woodcarver and metalworker. They lived and worked together for 60 years early in the 20th century. Sylvia Martin crafted a dual biography because Nora had been consistently relegated to the shadows given the higher public profile of Eirene. Double Act is an act of biographical justice to bring Nora into equal focus with Eirene. The Eirene Mort archive at the National Library of Australia is almost entirely visual. It includes over 20 sketchbooks, objects and artworks, though no letters between Eirene and Nora. Sylvia read their lives through images, travel sketches and lateral sources, including shipping lists and newspaper archives on Trove. Influenced by her own experience of coming out as a lesbian in the 1980s and finding no narratives that fit, Sylvia has spent 35 years writing about women in same-sex relationships from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Double Act is Sylvia’s fifth book and contains more of herself than any previous work.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Cynthia Banham chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: A hybrid of biographical reimagining, lyrical memoir and transnational family history, Mother Shadow is poetic, with whimsical detours and meditative qualities. The discovery of a torn 1898 birth certificate Cynthia found in a small packet of rescued family documents revealed that her great-grandmother Natalina wasn’t an orphan but a foundling, abandoned by her mother Ersilia, an unmarried peasant woman. Mother Shadow follows two interwoven emotional journeys: Cythnia’s detective-like quest to understand why Ersilia gave up Natalina, and her own reckoning with feelings of maternal inadequacy. Mother Shadow underwent many structural drafts before a mentor helped Cynthia to reorganise it thematically, weaving resonances between Ersilia’s 19th-century story and Banham’s own contemporary experience of mothering. When an anthropologist raised the possibility of family abuse as an explanation for Ersilia’s circumstances, Cynthia agonised over whether to include it. Ultimately, she decided that honesty about confronting possibilities was an ethical obligation. Cynthia’s advice for authors crafting hybrid forms of life writing is to understand why a story grabs them before they embark on the project because the answer is part of the story itself. ‘Start writing early, embrace many drafts, and understand that uncovering family history means navigating the question of who owns the past’, Cynthia suggests. ‘Not everyone in a family will answer the same way.’

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sheryle Bagwell chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Letter from Provence: Two Women, Two Centuries and a Village House in France. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Sheryle Bagwell explains how the chance discovery of a dust-covered volume of Madame de Sévigné’s letters in her Provençal attic became the catalyst for a story she had been unconsciously preparing to write for several decades. Sheryle reveals that the ‘two women’ of the subtitle are her mother Judith and Madame de Sévigné, a distinction that reframes the emotional architecture of the story. Sheryle describes how Madame de Sévigné, writing before the age of newspapers, effectively functioned as the world’s first blogger, giving her intimate circle and ultimately history, eyewitness accounts of Louis XIV’s court through letters she knew were being read aloud and passed around. Sheryle describes the discovery that her mother Judith and Madame de Sévigné had striking parallels. Both were feisty and both died without their daughters present, which became the emotional spine of the story. Sheryle reflects on writing the book later in life as an intentional choice: ‘I don’t think I could have written this book in mid-career’, she said. ‘I needed the wisdom that comes later in life to honestly reckon with a childhood shaped by domestic violence and a mother who never got to escape it.’ Sheryle closes the story with a letter to her mother written from Provence, which she describes as the first letter she ever wrote to her mother, and the one the entire story was always travelling towards.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Nigel Hamilton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Lincoln vs. Davis is the first dual biography to examine how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis fought each other as presidents and commanders-in-chief of their respective forces, the Union and the Confederacy, during the American Civil War. Lincoln and Davis coincidentally began train journeys to their Presidential inaugurations on the same day. By framing emancipation as a military order during a national emergency rather than civilian legislation, Lincoln legally freed 3.5 million enslaved people and ensured no European power would ever recognise the Confederacy, dooming Davis’s rebellion. Frustrated that historians have covered up crucial details and failed to explain why Lincoln delayed emancipation for nearly two years, Nigel Hamilton crafted Lincoln vs. Davis to correct the historical record, practising what he refers to as ‘biography as corrective’.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Zachary Leader chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Richard Ellmann’s biography of the novelist James Joyce is considered the greatest literary biography of the 20th century. Why Zachary Leader was inspired to craft Ellmann’s Joyce. Why Ellmann’s Joyce is structured in two sections: a chronological life of Richard Ellmann followed by a thematic ‘making of James Joyce’s biography’ section. Why Zachary opened the narrative with a chapter defending literary biography. Why Zachary portrayed Ellmann’s James Joyce as both scholarship and art, foregrounding Ellmann’s narrative craft, wit and realist virtues. Why Ellmann’s Joyce is a practical masterclass in biography.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Micaela Sahhar chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: The death of Micaela Sahhar’s grandmother’s last surviving sister created a sense of urgency for Micaela to capture her Palestinian family’s stories before they slipped beyond living memory. With many primary sources destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, Micaela learned to read absence as a form of evidence, drawing on object memory, fragments, photographs, and ephemeral archives to reconstruct what official records could not. Micaela’s grandfather’s late-life oral history tapes were a vital source of historical and family information. They looped between present and past, between stories and digressions and became a structural model for the encyclopaedic, non-linear form of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. In 2023, Micaela visited Jerusalem to retrace her family’s footsteps through the Old City. She recalls that walking the actual terrain, up hills, distances and ordinary neighbourhoods, brought a present-tense vividness to the story. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is structured as a 48-entry encyclopaedia spanning four generations of Micaela’s Palestinian family, from the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Palestinian community of Melbourne.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Professor Karen Fang chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Karen Fang explains why only a full-length biography could do justice to Tyrus Wong’s 106-year life that encompassed his achievements across fine art, animation, Hollywood storyboarding, greeting cards and kite-making. Karen reveals that the title Background Artist is Tyrus Wong’s Disney credit in the original 1942 release of the movie Bambi. Among the most revealing archival discoveries was Tyrus Wong’s personal correspondence that showed a wickedly funny, warm and creatively restless person that no formal interview could have captured. Karen reveals how Tyrus Wong’s signature visual style, rooted in Chinese brush painting technique and aesthetic heritage, transformed racial difference from a liability into an artistic asset, enabling him to succeed in a society that otherwise offered very little opportunity to Chinese Americans. The closing passages of Background Artist tie together the themes of visibility, immigration and artistic legacy, ending with the line Karen says came directly from her conversations with Tyrus Wong’s daughters: ‘Tyrus was always simply an artist.’

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, award-winning author Dr Debra Adelaide chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting When I Am Sixty-Four. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: When I Am Sixty-Four is a tender, poignant story based on Debra Adelaide’s lifelong friendship with the award-winning author, Gabrielle Carey. When I Am Sixty-Four began not as a planned book but as a single vivid memory that arrived unbidden while she was working on another project; it simply refused to let go. A work of extraordinary depth and grace, When I Am Sixty-Four is crafted as autofiction, a hybrid genre that blurs the line between fiction and autobiography. Debra defines autofiction as writing memoir using the tools of narrative fiction, shaping, rearranging, condensing, and inventing to reach for a broader emotional truth. Debra explains her decision not to name Gabrielle or anyone else in the book, wanting readers to bring their own experiences of loving someone in despair to the narrative. Debra describes the story’s mosaic structure of vignettes as entirely instinctive. The final tragic months of her friend’s life provide a loose chronological spine, while memories from their 50 years of shared history were weaved in. The story’s dark humour, Debra explains, was both an authentic expression of who Gabrielle Carey was, a woman with an extraordinary laugh, and a deliberate way of honouring her.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Troy Bramston chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. This is the first full biography of Gough Whitlam, a former Australian Prime Minister, since his death in 2014. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: The biography’s subtitle The Vista of the New came from a poem Gough Whitlam wrote in 1934 as a student at Canberra Grammar School. In it, he imagines a bolder brighter future for Australia. The biography’s central theme is political leadership. Troy Bramston is interested in how power is gained, used and lost. Gough Whitlam’s school reports noted his difficulty getting along with others. These interpersonal failures would contribute to his downfall decades later. Troy argues that Whitlam was not a man of destiny but a man of history, driven not by a sense of predestination but by a hunger to change Australia’s direction. Troy makes a compelling case for advancing the biographical subject. Continually asking what is new, he argues that a biography that doesn’t tell us something we didn’t know before, however well written, fails to fully justify itself.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Ian Hembrow chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees is the first full-length English biography of Anders Celsius, a modest Swedish astronomer who quietly revolutionised our understanding of the natural world. Ian Hembrow’s accidental discovery of Celsius’s story in 2016 sparked a years’-long quest that led him to the Arctic Circle, retracing Celsius’s 1736–37 expedition to measure the shape of the Earth. Celsius’s story is set against the backdrop of the European Enlightenment, illustrating how he thrived in the vibrant 18th-century scientific community while unlocking fundamental mysteries of nature. Ian Hembrow draws connections to the present, noting that Celsius, who is best known for inventing the 100-point centigrade temperature scale, now lends his name to global climate targets as humanity strives to limit warming to 1.5°C. How Ian Hembrow delves into Celsius’s human story, sharing the personal struggles and triumphs behind his scientific achievements and offering a poignant reminder that even great scientific minds face immense personal challenges. The relevance of Celsius’s story today, reminding us of the crucial role of scientific inquiry and our shared responsibility to use knowledge wisely as we face urgent challenges like climate change.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Hester Kaplan chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Twice Born: Finding My Father In the Margins of Biography. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: The catalyst for crafting Twice Born was the death of Hester’s father, the biographer Justin Kaplan. Hester realised she had lost the chance to ask her father the questions that had always eluded her during his lifetime. Rather than being a conventional biography, Twice Born blends biography, memoir, and fiction, a structure Kaplan chose deliberately to view her father from many different angles and points of view, enabling her to know him in ways impossible while he was alive. Kaplan discovered that her father chose Mark Twain as his biographical subject because of deep personal parallels that included an early loss of parents, a traumatic childhood and an identity reinvented through writing. Hester insists that biographers inevitably choose subjects who mirror their own inner lives. Kaplan reflects on how memory and fiction blur once put on the page. Because Justin Kaplan always wrote behind closed study doors, his daughter uses fiction to imaginatively enter that space and reconstruct his writing process.