Each year, The Wheeler Centre hosts “The State of the (Writing) Nation”, where an Australian writer presents an address on what’s happening in Australian literature. Maria Tumarkin tells Mel she turned down the…

Miles Franklin award-winning novelist Sofie Laguna is an intuitive writer. She chats to Mel about her new book, Infinite Splendours, and her writing process. 

Set in the Grampians, Infinite Splendours follows Lawrence…

Off the coast of Tasmania, there are thousands of shipwrecks, which Jane Harper says was too good to pass up for her next crime novel. Earlier this year she organised a diving trip…

“Money is like gravity. It distorts time and space.”

Rick Morton is an award-winning journalist whose memoir, One Hundred Years Of Dirt, was shortlisted for multiple literary prizes. But growing up in…

The Feminist Writers Festival (FWF) 2020 kicks off on November 14 to tackle four big questions for contemporary feminism. Nikki Anderson, FWF Program Director, joins Backstory to chat about the upcoming festival.

FWF2020…

Former Triple R broadcaster Jacinta Parsons tells us about her recently released memoir Unseen: The Secret World Of Chronic Illness. Jacinta has lived with Crohn’s disease for over 20 years and is…

It’s all about the details. Author, critic, and essayist Tegan Bennett Daylight would tell this to her students to emphasise that the originality of a story lies within the detail and that the…

Christopher Raja was 11 years old when his father decided to move their family from Calcutta to Melbourne in 1986. He joins Beth AQ to talk about his memoir Into The Suburbs: A…

Anita Heiss is a professor, poet, author and ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF), a not-for-profit charity dedicated to supporting literacy skills in remote Indigenous communities by gifting books, publishing culturally appropriate…

Gold Logie-winning actor, script-writer and all-round Australian icon John Wood speaks to Daniel, Sarah and Gez about his memoir How I Clawed My Way To The Middle – an account of how a…