Biographers in Conversation

Gabriella
  • 4.8 (13)
  • Books
  • Updated Weekly

Biographer Gabriella Kelly-Davies chats with biographers across the world about the myriad of choices they make while researching, writing and publishing life stories. In every episode, she explores elements of narrative strategy such as structure, use of fiction techniques, facts and truth, beginnings and endings and to what extent the writer interpreted the evidence rather than providing clues and leaving it to readers to do the interpreting themselves. She also asks how they researched their books; how they balanced a subject’s public, personal and inner lives; and ethical issues, such as privacy and revealing secrets.

  1. 5 days ago

    Chameleon

    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.

  2. 20 Aug

    Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath

    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.

  3. 15 Aug

    ‘Find Me at the Jaffa Gate’, 2026 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work, winner

    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.

  4. 11 Aug

    ‘Max Dupain: A Portrait’. 2026 National Biography Award winner

    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.’

  5. 6 Aug

    The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography

    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.

  6. 30 July

    Fourteen Ways of Looking

    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.

  7. 22 July

    Clever Men

    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.

  8. 16 July

    Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: Gwen and Augustus John

    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.

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Ratings & Reviews

4.8
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

Biographer Gabriella Kelly-Davies chats with biographers across the world about the myriad of choices they make while researching, writing and publishing life stories. In every episode, she explores elements of narrative strategy such as structure, use of fiction techniques, facts and truth, beginnings and endings and to what extent the writer interpreted the evidence rather than providing clues and leaving it to readers to do the interpreting themselves. She also asks how they researched their books; how they balanced a subject’s public, personal and inner lives; and ethical issues, such as privacy and revealing secrets.

Information

  • Creator
    Gabriella
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Biographers in Conversation

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