Biographers in Conversation

Nicholas Boggs "Baldwin: A Love Story"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Nicholas Boggs chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Baldwin: A Love Story.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why Nicholas Boggs structured the biography around Baldwin’s four great loves rather than chronology.
Baldwin’s frank acknowledgment that his novels were driven by autobiographical impulses gave Boggs rare biographical licence to connect fiction to life without making reductive one-to-one correlations between characters and real people.​
Retracing Baldwin’s footsteps to Corsica, Istanbul and the south of France proved essential for capturing sensory details like the smell of maquis plants that connected biographer to subject across time.
Boggs challenged the prevailing image of Baldwin as either a civil rights icon or a tragic figure, instead revealing he died at 63 surrounded by his great loves.
The biography’s epilogue deliberately intervenes in Baldwin’s posthumous reputation, joining a chorus of scholars and writers working to dismantle the narrative of creative decline that attached itself to Baldwin’s later years, reorienting readers toward the enduring power of his voice and vision.​

Francesca Wade "Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Francesca Wade chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife was sparked by Francesca’s access to previously unpublished Leon Katz interview transcripts with Alice B. Toklas, revealing how Gertrude Stein deliberately constructed her public persona and how Toklas spent 20 years stewarding Stein’s posthumous legacy as instructed by Stein’s will.
Francesca challenges the conventional biographical form by structuring the narrative in two parts: first telling Stein’s life story as she presented it, then interrogating and deepening that account through posthumous archival discoveries, dramatising how biographical knowledge is constructed rather than simply discovered.
Francesca deliberately exposes the archival ‘workings’ behind biography, showing how Yale archivist Donald Gallup’s negotiations with Toklas over burning love letters and sealing documents shaped what future generations could know about Stein’s life and her relationships.
The central enigma Francesca explores is Stein’s binary reputation: celebrated as either a radical modernist writer or merely a personality symbolising 1920s Paris bohemia. This tension frustrated Stein in her lifetime and continues to complicate her literary legacy.
Francesca concludes that biography is fundamentally an artificial and odd enterprise of converting life’s messiness into linear narrative, with every sentence representing a decision shaped by the biographer’s attitudes and biases. This makes biographical practice itself worthy of interrogation and experimentation

Lance Richardson "True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation Lance Richardson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Lance Richardson approached the biography with a central thesis question: how did Matthiessen develop his unique sensibility that allowed him to move fluidly between science and spirituality, treating them as complementary rather than mutually incompatible worldviews?
The biography’s unauthorised status liberated Richardson to tell the unvarnished truth without contractual obligations to polish Matthiessen’s legacy.
Richardson’s methodology prioritised archival evidence over potentially fallible memories, deliberately presenting conflicting accounts from sources rather than reconciling them artificially, which he considers fiction and a biographical pitfall.
How retracing Matthiessen’s trek to Nepal’s Crystal Monastery enabled Richardson to viscerally understand the elemental spaces where Matthiessen shed ego and responsibilities to access his most authentic self.
Richardson deliberately avoided portraying Matthiessen as a unified self, instead showing how his fractured personas were all manifestations of the same restless search for meaning and true nature.
The biography’s ethical framework prioritised truth-telling about Matthiessen’s serial infidelities and neglect while giving substantial narrative space to Maria Matthiessen and other women to speak in their own words, resisting the biographical tradition of relegating wives to background roles.
The epilogue’s focus on Matthiessen’s Zen teachings about death and essential mind provided closure for a biography about a fundamentally unresolved life.

Frances Wilson "Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Frances Wilson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
How Muriel Spark’s first 39 turbulent years provided the raw material for her fiction.
Frances Wilson’s discovery of Spark’s games, puzzles and anagrams, including the invented ‘doppelganger’, Nita McEwen, whose name conceals the chilling phrase, Twin Menace.
Wilson structured Electric Spark around Spark’s ‘four Marys’ and the Scottish ballad tradition, tracing how Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Shelley, Mary Stranger and Marie Stopes shaped Spark’s imagination.
The spooky permeability between life and art: Spark’s belief she lived in the future tense, her ‘evil eye’ and the uncanny way events in her novels repeatedly echoed in her own life.
How during her four-month sprint writing Electric Spark, Wilson could feel Spark’s hand on her own, mirroring Spark’s own accounts of tuning into ‘voices in the air’.
The ethical and imaginative challenges of writing biography about an inveterate trickster: reading between the lines of Curriculum Vitae and Loitering with Intent, embracing contradiction, and accepting that any life of Spark can only ever offer one powerful version of the truth, if at all.

Summer Series - Stephen J. Campbell: ”Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life”

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation’s special summer season, Dr Stephen J. Campbell chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why Stephen Campbell resists the urge to create a seamless narrative and instead embraces the mystery, silence and gaps in Leonardo da Vinci’s story.
How the book’s structure reflects the fragmented reality of Leonardo’s life.
The origin of the book’s title and how it challenges traditional biographical expectations by leaning into ambiguity.
How Campbell uses philosophical chapter titles and historical nuance to explore mythmaking and modern interpretations of Leonardo da Vinci.
Why Campbell avoids speculation and instead invites readers to sit with what we don’t know, treating uncertainty as revealing rather than inconvenient.
The biographer’s role as a curator of questions rather than authority, a model of life writing that prioritises transparency over certainty.
The myths the book gently dismantles, from the lonely genius trope to misconceptions about Leonardo’s inventions and personality.
How An Untraceable Life encourages us to rethink what biography can be and to rediscover awe in the unresolvable aspects of a life.

Susan Wyndham "Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Susan Wyndham chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower. 
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why Susan Wyndham opened the biography with Elizabeth Harrower’s late-life renaissance.
The meaning of the title: ‘The Woman in the Watchtower.’
Details of Susan’s exhaustive archival research. 
How studying Trove, divorce papers and criminal records enabled Susan to fill gaps in the historical record.​
How cross-referencing Harrower’s letters to multiple recipients revealed how she presented different versions of herself to various people.​
How Susan Wyndham wove literary criticism throughout the narrative.
Why Susan is mostly invisible in the narrative.

Clare Wright OAM: "Näku Dhäruk - The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Professor Clare Wright OAM chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Clare Wright’s deep 15-year cultural integration with the Yolŋu community in North-East Arnhem Land enabled her to write The Bark Petitions collaboratively and authentically from a First Nation’s perspective.
The four Bark Petitions were created by Yolŋu Elders in 1963 as a form of diplomacy between two sovereign nations. The Yolŋu Elders were protesting bauxite mining on sacred lands without their consent.
The Bark Petitions reframes the petitions as a manifestation of Yolŋu law and territorial rights, revealing a sophisticated legal system governing land, kinship and governance that predates and rivals European colonial systems.
Wright positions The Bark Petitions as Australian political history with Indigenous perspectives restored.
The Bark Petitions transcends a classic object biography. Instead, it’s a hybrid of cultural storytelling, sacred stories, oral history, narrative history, political activism and a powerful account of sovereignty and resistance.
The Bark Petitions employs a kaleidoscopic, non-linear narrative structure.
Wright deliberately gives the final voice to a contemporary Yolŋu woman, emphasising that Indigenous people are living storytellers shaping ongoing national conversations and positioning the Bark Petitions as an eternal flame of resistance and knowledge.

Summer Series - Andrew Ford’s ”The Shortest History of Music”

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation’s special summer season, multi-award-winning broadcaster, composer and author Andrew Ford AOM chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his latest book, The Shortest History of Music.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Andrew Ford explains how he balanced brevity and intellectual depth while crafting a 200-page book spanning 4,000 years of musical history
How he synthesised a multiplicity of musical traditions and cultures into a seamless narrative
How he balanced historical accuracy with masterful storytelling
Why he examined music from multiple angles: Its fundamental impulses; the impact of notation; music as a profession and commodity; the concept of modernism and the revolutionary effects of recording technology
How he skilfully weaved history, culture and personal insight into a tapestry that celebrates music in all its forms.

Summer Series - Oliver Soden "Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat"

In this first episode of Biographers in Conversation’s special summer season, the distinguished British biographer Oliver Soden chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
How Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography, the imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, influenced Oliver Soden’s choices while crafting The Poet’s Cat
How Oliver cleverly used Jeoffry as a lens through which to explore Christopher Smart’s character, personality and often troubled life
How Oliver retraced Jeoffry’s and Christopher Smart’s real and imagined footsteps in 18th-century London, discovering its vibrant cast of characters such as King George, the composer Handel and Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of British literature
How Oliver balanced fact and fiction given his admission that ‘the dividing line between fact and fiction is necessarily wobbly’ in The Poet’s Cat, and ‘sometimes one is disguised as the other’
How Oliver accessed Jeoffry’s interior life and inner monologue, enabling him to write from the perspective of an 18th-century alley cat
How Oliver shifted from the traditional, scholarly tone and narrative style of his biographies of the composer Michael Tippett and playwright Noël Coward to the whimsical, witty, affectionate and playful style of The Poet’s Cat
How Oliver balanced the lightheartedness of Jeoffry’s antics with the book’s deeper philosophical themes.

Josie McSkimming: "Gutsy Girls: Love, Poetry and Sisterhood"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, pychotherapist, university lecturer and author Josie McSkimming, chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gutsy Girls: Love, Poetry and Sisterhood.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Why Gutsy Girls began as a 180,000-word biography of the poet Dorothy Porter, though later transformed into a hybrid of memoir, biography and family history.
Why Gutsy Girls is a pioneering work placing sibling relationships at the centre of the narrative.
Why Josie waited until both her parents had died before publishing. 
Why Josie shaped the 19 chapters of Gutsy Girls to mirror Dorothy Porter’s published and unpublished works chronologically, from her childhood creation ‘My Pocket Book of Prayer’ (spelled P-O-K-E-T), through to her acclaimed verse novels, including The Monkey’s Mask.
Why Josie chose the title Gutsy Girls.
How Josie found her own authentic voice beyond religious constraints, while honouring the strength of all three sisters who had to forge paths beyond childhood trauma and family expectations.